Sr. Product Engineer, AI Systems
3 days ago
Austin
Job DescriptionEmploy is transforming how hiring gets done. With our three ATS solutions - Jobvite, Lever, and JazzHR - plus cutting-edge AI Companions, we free recruiters from admin work and give them more time for what matters: connecting with people. More than 23,000 global customers rely on Employ to make millions of candidate connections each year, helping them hire smarter, faster, and at scale. From growing startups to the world’s most recognized brands, we’re redefining what’s possible in talent acquisition. We’re a fast-moving, remote-first team of builders and innovators who live our people-first philosophy every day. We back it up with flexible work scheduling and paid time off, comprehensive benefits, and career development opportunities that help you thrive. At Employ, you won’t just grow your career - you’ll help millions of others grow theirs. Come join our team where we have each other’s backs, champion our customers, hold ourselves accountable, and shape what’s next in talent acquisition. Candidate Safety NoticePlease note, employ takes candidate safety seriously. Employ recruiters and employees communicate only via official @employinc.com email addresses. We will never request payment or personal financial information during the hiring process. If you receive suspicious outreach claiming to be from Employ, please report it to . About the Role:In this senior-level role, you will lead the architecture and evolution of AI-powered systems that transform probabilistic model outputs into reliable, production-grade product capabilities. You will design and ship systems around agents, retrieval pipelines, orchestration layers, and evaluation frameworks, while defining the architectural standards that ensure AI-driven features operate safely and at scale across our platform. This is not a feature-delivery role — it is a systems-definition role. Your decisions will shape how AI capabilities are built, evaluated, and deployed across the organization. About the Team: Our AI Foundations team is building the foundation for how AI will power the next generation of products at Employ. This is a high-ownership, high-autonomy team responsible for turning rapidly evolving model capabilities into reliable, customer-facing systems. What You'll Do: Architect & Ship AI-Native Systems * Lead the architecture and delivery of end-to-end AI-powered systems, including agents, RAG pipelines, orchestration layers, and reasoning workflows. * Translate product vision into scalable technical systems. * Define contracts, state management strategies, and guardrails for AI-driven workflows. * Own and evolve API contracts that AI systems interact with, ensuring reliability, idempotency, authentication safety, and rate limiting. Engineer Reliability at Scale * Design schema enforcement and validation layers for AI-generated outputs. * Implement retries, fallback strategies, and failure-mode containment. * Establish evaluation frameworks for benchmarking, regression testing, and drift detection. * Create observability standards for AI systems, including structured logging, telemetry, tracing, and performance monitoring. * Productionize experimental AI capabilities into scalable, secure services. Set Direction & Elevate the Organization * Establish architectural patterns and standards adopted across teams. * Mentor engineers in AI-native and spec-driven development practices. * Influence engineering culture through clarity, urgency, and execution. * Decompose high-level business outcomes into executable technical systems. What You Bring:You have mastered the fundamentals of software engineering and operate at a higher level of abstraction. You are not simply accepting AI-generated code — you review, restructure, and integrate it into cohesive, production-grade systems. • 4+ years building AI-augmented product capabilities (LLMs, RAG systems, agents, orchestration frameworks)., • Event-Driven & Asynchronous Systems : Experience designing decoupled systems using queues such as Kafka, SQS, or BullMQ, and implementing asynchronous workflows that prevent blocking operations in user-facing systems., • State Management Strategy : Experience persisting state across sessions, managing context windows efficiently, and handling concurrency and race conditions when multiple agents interact with shared data., • Structured Data Enforcement : Experience enforcing structured outputs using schema validation tools such as Pydantic, Zod, or JSON Schema to ensure AI-generated outputs are reliable and machine-readable. AI Stack: Orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, or custom agent loops. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Hybrid search, re-ranking, and chunking strategies. Vector databases such as Pinecone, pgvector, or Weaviate Database & Infrastructure: Advanced SQL skills including query optimization and indexing strategies. Containerization using Docker, Kubernetes or similar orchestration platforms. Experience running isolated environments for code execution Why You’ll Love Working Here: Make an impact: Your work will directly shape how thousands of employees experience total rewards at Employ — ensuring programs that attract, engage, and retain top talent across the globe. Meaningful, mission-driven work: Join a team where operational excellence in HR directly supports Employ’s mission to improve hiring outcomes for both people and businesses. Unlimited PTO: Trust-based time off so you can recharge and bring your best self to work. Comprehensive benefits: Medical, dental, and vision coverage to support you and your family’s health and well-being. Learning & development programs: Access to training, mentorship, and development resources to grow your skills — from HR operations to total rewards strategy. At Employ, we believe that when people from different backgrounds and perspectives come together, amazing things happen. We’re proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer, and we’re committed to creating an environment where everyone feels welcomed, respected, and able to thrive. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We believe that when people feel they belong, they can do their best work and we want every member of our team to feel that sense of belonging. If you need accommodation at any stage of the hiring process, please reach out. We’ll be glad to support you. Recruitment Fraud Notice:Employ takes candidate safety seriously. Please be aware that Employ recruiters and interviewers will only communicate with candidates using official email addresses ending in @employinc.com. We will never ask for payment, banking information, or personal financial details at any stage of the hiring process, and we do not conduct interviews via messaging apps or social media platforms. If you receive communication that appears suspicious or claims to represent Employ but does not come from an @employinc.com email address, do not respond or continue engaging with the sender. Please report the message to . We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.