Staff Software Engineer, AI Products

Ada; United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

An innovative AI customer service company is seeking a Staff Engineer to lead the performance team focused on their Reasoning Engine. In this role, you'll be responsible for improving the engine's reliability and performance while mentoring team members. Ideal candidates will have over 7 years of backend or full-stack experience and the ability to design and maintain high-performance systems. The company offers many benefits, including unlimited vacation and flexible work options.

Benefits

Unlimited vacation

Comprehensive benefits

Flexible work schedule

Employee assistance plan

Learning and development budget

Work-from-home budget

Qualifications

• 7+ years in backend or full-stack development across the lifecycle.
• Experience building and scaling large distributed systems in production.
• Strong grasp of cloud architectures and related technologies.

Responsibilities

• Own a clear area of the engine and share knowledge through documentation.
• Lead reviews and maintain a backlog of technical work.
• Mentor across teams and establish repeatable patterns.

Skills

Backend development

Full-stack development

Cloud architectures

API design and maintenance

Mentoring

Job description

Ada is an AI customer service company whose mission is to make customer service extraordinary for everyone. We're driven to raise a new standard of quality customer service at scale, enabling enterprise companies to deliver experiences that people love–instant, proactive, personalized, and effortless.

Ada is an AI transformation platform and partner—combining strategic expertise with powerful AI agent management technology to accelerate businesses’ AI maturity to keep them ahead of the curve. With Ada, 83% of customer conversations—and counting—are effortlessly resolved through automation, giving teams more time back, companies more resources to focus on growth, and customers more life to focus on what matters most to them.

Established in 2016, Ada is a Canadian company that has powered over 5.5 billion interactions for leading brands like Square, YETI, Canva, and Monday.com, saving millions of hours of human effort. Backed with over $250M in funding from tier-one investors including Accel, Bessemer, FirstMark, Spark, and Version One Ventures, Ada is a pioneer in the management and application of AI in customer service.

At Ada, we see growth as a reflection of each individual owner’s personal growth. That’s why our values are rooted in driving progress and continuous improvement. If you’re ambitious and eager to grow, Ada could be the place for you.

AI engineers at Ada have autonomy, ownership, and the mandate to make a large impact with product, design, and ML partners. We build scalable systems and work with LLMs. Staff Engineers set technical standards, act as subject matter experts, raise quality across teams, mentor widely, and lead cross team initiatives that move business outcomes. Our AI agent is powered by the Reasoning Engine, which grounds answers in each customer’s knowledge and policies and composes responses from retrieved context.

Our Role

As a Staff Engineer on the Performance team, you focus on Ada’s Reasoning Engine. The engine retrieves the best first-party content, grounds the LLM in that context, and generates replies to answer support questions for our clients. You partner with internal and external stakeholders to deliver a roadmap that keeps the engine performant, scalable, and reliable, and you translate technical tradeoffs into clear business impact.

• Own a clear area of the engine. Know our architecture, domain, and data. Pick the right tools and design for current and future load. Share knowledge through searchable docs.
• Lead reviews. Keep tests, observability, SLOs, and SLAs in place and met. Maintain a visible backlog of technical work. Keep dependencies up to date and fix security issues fast. Work with product and design from discovery through iteration.
• Prioritize high-leverage work that increases developer velocity, reduces latency, unlocks capabilities, mitigates incident risk, improves onboarding, and results in clear how-tos and documentation.
• Mentor across teams. Demo complex ideas. Establish repeatable patterns others adopt. Review designs and PRs beyond your team and stay available to unblock engineers.

About You

• 7+ years in backend or full-stack development across the lifecycle
• Built and scaled large distributed systems in production
• Strong grasp of cloud architectures and related technologies
• Designed and maintained APIs for external developers
• Clear communicator who partners across product, design, ML, and GTM
• Proven mentoring and technical leadership

Outcomes

• Higher Automated Resolution with reliable, on-policy replies
• Roadmap delivered for the Reasoning Engine with strong reliability and performance
• SLOs met with effective SLAs and clear observability
• Lower defects and regressions, current dependencies, no open security vulnerabilities
• Meaningful latency and throughput gains on high-traffic paths
• Cross-team improvements that lift developer velocity and platform capabilities
• Visible mentoring outcomes and org-wide upleveling

We offer a range of benefits, including unlimited vacation, comprehensive benefits, wellness account, employee and family assistance plan, flexible work schedule, remote-first and in-person friendly work options, learning and development budget, and work-from-home budget.