Staff Software Engineer, AI Platform

Flex; United States; Hybrid; USD 170,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive medical, dental, and vision

Company equity

401(k) plan with company match

Unlimited paid time off + 13 company paid holidays

Parental leave

Flex Cares Program

Free Flex subscription

Job summary

Flex is looking for a Staff AI Engineer to join our AI Central Team to revolutionize the way we work by enhancing AI-first workflows. You will direct the creation of tools that power workflows across departments, mentoring team members and ensuring successful AI integration. The ideal candidate has extensive experience in software development and AI systems.

This role is hybrid, with on-site work required in New York, San Francisco, or Salt Lake City 2-3 days per week. Excellent salary and benefits are provided.

Qualifications

• 6+ years in software development or related field.
• 2+ years building production AI or agentic systems.
• Experience with agent infrastructures and code execution sandboxes.
• Strong experience with relational SQL and NoSQL databases.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain the agent platform.
• Develop new APIs, SDKs, and developer surfaces.
• Scale the platform to support growing agent catalog.
• Identify and implement AI use cases in production.

Skills

Software development experience

AI systems experience

Technical leadership

Coding experience with AI dev tools

Agent infrastructure experience

AI workflow design

Java, Python, or TypeScript

SQL and NoSQL databases

AWS cloud services

Communication skills

Job description

Flex is a growth‑stage, NYC‑headquartered FinTech company that is creating the best rent payment experience. It’s hard to believe that it’s 2026 and paying rent on time is expensive, inflexible, and difficult. We’re here to change that! Flex enables our users to pay rent throughout the month on a schedule that better fits their finances and budget. Our mission is to empower as many renters as possible with flexibility over their most significant recurring expense. After deliberately keeping a stealth profile as we built up unprecedented investor support and an enthusiastic user base, we are looking for motivated individuals to help us keep our mission growing. Will you be a part of the team?

About the role

Flex is looking for a Staff AI Engineer to join our AI Central Team and help us transform the way we work by building the tools and capabilities that support AI‑first workflows across Flex.

As a Staff AI Engineer at Flex, you’ll help set technical direction and shape the long‑term architecture of the AI systems and tools that all departments use to power their agentic workflows. You will own AI platform features and capabilities end‑to‑end including analysis, planning, implementation and production rollout to our internal customers. You’ll work closely with your AI Central Team peers and consult with department leads to anticipate business needs and proactively build the AI capabilities to address them. You’ll also play a critical role in mentoring, elevating technical standards, and ensuring the success of our Flex’s transformation into an AI‑first organization.

What you’ll do

• Design, implement, and maintain the agent platform including orchestration, tool execution, sandboxed code runtimes, observability, and the developer‑facing SDKs and UI.
• Design and develop new APIs, SDKs, and developer surfaces that let other teams onboard agents quickly and safely, with strong defaults for evals, guardrails, human‑in‑the‑loop review, and audit.
• Scale the platform to support a growing catalog of agents, skills, and MCP integrations across Flex while maintaining performance, reliability, and cost efficiency.
• Continuously improve our daily operations with automation, tooling, design evolution, and observability, including agent‑trace visibility, evaluation pipelines, and sandbox runtime monitoring.
• Work closely with cross‑functional teams to identify high‑leverage AI use cases and turn them into production‑ready agents on the platform.
• Set the bar for AI‑assisted engineering practices and responsible AI use across Flex, mentor engineers on how to design, build, and operate agentic systems, and bring outside innovation back into our roadmap.

Skills that are required

• 6+ years of experience in software development or a related field, with at least 2+ years building production AI or agentic systems.
• Experience in technical leadership, guiding engineering teams through complex projects.
• Hands‑on experience with coding CLIs and AI dev tools (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Cursor, or equivalents) – both as a daily‑driver user and as a builder integrating them into team workflows.
• Experience with agent infrastructure and code‑execution sandboxes (Modal, E2B, Cloudflare Sandboxes, Daytona, or Firecracker/gVisor‑based runtimes), with a clear point of view on isolation, scaling, and cost trade‑offs.
• Experience building AI‑first workflows end‑to‑end, including LLM application design, prompt and context engineering, RAG, and human‑in‑the‑loop patterns.
• Experience creating and managing agents and agent platforms, including multi‑agent orchestration (LangGraph, custom planners, sub‑agent patterns), tool/skill registries, and MCP‑based integrations.
• Experience with eval frameworks and offline/online evaluation of agent quality, plus observability and tracing for non‑deterministic systems.
• Experience with Java, Python, Golang, or TypeScript/Node.js.
• Strong experience with relational SQL and NoSQL databases, such as MySQL/PostgreSQL/DynamoDB.
• Experience designing and developing fault‑tolerant and scalable distributed systems, including workflow and job‑orchestration engines.
• Experience with AWS cloud services: ECS/EKS, Lambda, API Gateway, VPC, RDS, etc.
• Infrastructure as code (AWS CLI, AWS CDK/Terraform).
• Strong communication skills with the ability to understand and explain technical issues to a non‑technical audience.
• Follow engineering best practices as well as propose new ones – especially around responsible AI use, guardrails, and security for agentic systems.
• Bonus: experience with model and prompt evaluation tooling, secure tool‑use sandboxing, retrieval and vector stores, and operating multi‑tenant AI platforms at scale.

Compensation

Flex takes a market‑based approach to pay, and compensation may vary depending on your primary work location. Work locations are categorized into one of three tiers based on a cost of labor index for that geographic area. The successful candidate’s starting pay will be commensurate with their experience, qualifications, and Flex’s internal leveling guidelines and benchmarks.

• Tier 1 (NYC/Bay Area): $200,000 – $250,000 USD
• Tier 2 (Austin, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago, Atlanta): $180,000 – $225,000 USD
• Tier 3 (SLC, all other USA cities): $170,000 – $212,000 USD

Life at Flex

We understand that it takes a diverse team of highly intelligent, curious, determined, empathetic, and self‑aware people to grow a successful company. Our HQ is located in New York City, but we have employees located throughout the US, Australia, Canada and South America. We are growing quickly, but deliberately, with a focus on building an inclusive culture. Our dynamic team has incredible perspectives to share, just as we know you do, and we take great pride in being an equal‑opportunity workplace.

Offices

Roles posted in New York, San Francisco, and Salt Lake City are hybrid positions with on‑site expectations of 2‑3 days per week in our local offices. For candidates outside of these areas, you may be eligible for our relocation assistance program.

Benefits for full‑time U.S. employees

• Competitive medical, dental, and vision
• Company equity
• 401(k) plan with company match
• Unlimited paid time off + 13 company paid holidays
• Parental leave
• Flex Cares Program: Non‑profit company match + pet adoption coverage
• Free Flex subscription

Benefits for full‑time non‑U.S. employees

• Competitive compensation + company equity
• Unlimited PTO

Equal Employment Opportunity

As set forth in Flex’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.