Staff Software Engineer – AI Systems - NYC hybrid

The Developer Link; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

The Developer Link is seeking a Staff Software Engineer in New York to architect and ship production-grade AI-native systems. You will lead complex distributed backends, design scalable Python platforms, and own cross-team initiatives.

You’ll mentor engineers, drive architectural decisions, and ensure reliable, auditable outputs. This is a hands-on, leadership-heavy role requiring deep Python and frontend (React/TypeScript) experience.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience.
• Track record of leading complex systems from design to production.
• Strong hands-on Python experience with asynchronous services and scalable systems.
• Excellent understanding of distributed-systems fundamentals (event-driven architectures, queues, workers, state machines).
• Ability to build product-quality applications using React and TypeScript when needed.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build production agent and multi-agent systems.
• Design orchestration layers and infrastructure for reliability and auditability.
• Develop scalable Python platforms and product-quality React/TypeScript apps.
• Own distributed backend infrastructure including event-driven workers, queues, and pipelines.
• Lead engineering initiatives and mentor senior engineers across teams.

Skills

Python

Backend

Distributed systems

React/TypeScript

AI-native development

Tools

Asynchronous services

Event-driven architecture

Job description

Location: New York City – four days onsite in Hudson Yards

I’m working with an early-stage NYC company building governed AI systems for regulated financial institutions.

They’re creating technology that allows banks and wealth managers to deliver personalised financial guidance at scale while ensuring every output is explainable, auditable and compliant. This isn’t AI bolted onto an existing product - the intelligence layer is the product.

They’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer with strong Python, backend and distributed-systems experience who is deeply engaged with AI-native development.

You don’t need to come from a traditional machine-learning background, but you should have used modern AI tools to build and ship serious production software. You’ll also need the technical judgement to separate genuinely useful emerging capabilities from hype and help determine how they should be adopted across the engineering organisation.

This is a deeply hands-on position. You’ll architect and build complex systems, lead major engineering initiatives and raise standards across the team - not simply produce diagrams while everyone else writes the code.

What you’ll be doing:

• Architecting and building production agent and multi-agent systems


• Designing orchestration layers and infrastructure that make AI systems reliable and auditable


• Building scalable Python platforms and product-quality React/TypeScript applications


• Owning distributed backend infrastructure, including event-driven workers, queues, job pipelines and multi-stage processing systems


• Designing modelling and reasoning systems where outputs must be correct, traceable and defensible


• Establishing approaches to AI evaluation, validation, monitoring and quality assurance


• Driving decisions around schemas, APIs, system boundaries and service architecture


• Evaluating new models, tools and development patterns before turning the strongest ideas into production systems


• Leading engineering initiatives across technical and cross-functional teams


• Mentoring senior engineers and raising the wider engineering bar

What they’re looking for:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience


• A track record of leading complex systems from initial design through to production


• Strong hands-on Python experience, including asynchronous services, type-safe code and scalable systems


• Excellent distributed-systems fundamentals, including event-driven architecture, message queues, workers and job state machines


• Strong application architecture, database and data-modelling knowledge


• The ability to build product-quality applications using React and TypeScript when required


• Experience building and shipping production software using modern AI development tools


• A strong interest in AI-native software and the judgement to distinguish valuable new capabilities from hype


• Experience leading technical initiatives or acting as a force multiplier across an engineering organisation


• A product mindset and comfort working through ambiguous, high-ownership problems

Experience with agent architectures, LLM integration, RAG, model evaluation or production AI pipelines would be valuable but isn’t essential.

Experience in fintech, healthcare, legal technology or another regulated industry would also be useful, as would exposure to data engineering, cloud infrastructure or infrastructure as code.

You’ll need to be based in - or willing to relocate to - New York and comfortable working onsite in Hudson Yards four days per week.