Staff Engineer - AI Platform

The role

Design and build agentic AI systems and the shared AI platform for HighLevel's Platform Services team. This is a hands-on individual contributor role that sets technical direction, writes and reviews code, and owns system design.

What you will do

• Build production-grade multi-step, tool-using agentic systems for platform automation and internal engineering workflows
• Build a shared AI platform for product teams, including agent frameworks, tool and MCP integrations, and an LLM gateway
• Establish evaluation and observability for AI systems, including eval harnesses, agent run tracing, and quality, latency, cost and safety metrics
• Drive AI-driven engineering practices that improve developer velocity
• Manage cloud infrastructure for AI workloads across GCP/AWS, including scaling, security and cost governance
• Set architecture and technical standards, lead design reviews and mentor engineers
• Build agents with guardrails, scoped permissions, audit trails and graceful degradation
• Optimize inference, token and infrastructure cost without losing quality or reliability
• Partner with product engineering, SRE, security and leadership on AI platform direction

Required qualifications

• 12+ years of overall software engineering experience, including significant time as a senior or staff-level individual contributor
• At least 1+ year architecting agentic systems in production
• AI-first mindset: actively uses AI tools in own engineering workflow
• Expert-level proficiency in Go, Python or Node.js
• Strong hands-on orientation; not a purely managerial role for the last 1+ year
• Strong working knowledge of LLM application fundamentals, including tool calling, MCP, retrieval, prompt and model management, and evaluation
• Strong observability fundamentals, including AI observability with tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch or equivalent
• Strong understanding of distributed systems architecture
• Track record of measurable cost optimization in an enterprise cloud environment, including LLM token spend
• Practical experience with GCP and/or AWS service management
• At least 3+ years as an individual contributor on platform teams at enterprise scale
• Proven ability to lead technically without authority

Nice to have

• Open-source contributions or published work on agentic systems

Before you apply

• AI-first mindset is listed as a must-have requirement

About the company

HighLevel is an AI-powered business operating system serving over 1 million businesses across 150+ countries. The company describes itself as a global, remote-first organization with over 2,000 team members across 10+ countries.