Lead Software Engineer

Americas Test Kitchen • Boston, MA

4d • Onsite

About The Position

America's Test Kitchen is looking for a Lead Software Engineer to join our Retention Zone and lead the charge on bringing AI into our subscription products and to drive subscriber value by delivering new experiences. This is a hands-on individual contributor role for someone who can identify where AI creates real subscriber value, architect the right approach, work with Product to prioritize and build it – while raising the bar for how the broader engineering team thinks about and works with AI. You won't just advise. You'll prototype, ship, and iterate on AI features that make a tangible difference to our subscribers – working shoulder-to-shoulder with our Content Engagement and Search & Discovery product teams to make it happen.

Requirements

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years focused on shipping AI/ML features in production
• Deep familiarity with LLMs and modern AI tooling – prompt engineering, RAG, function calling, fine-tuning, vector databases, and agentic frameworks
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: system design, APIs, scalable data pipelines, and clean, maintainable code
• Experience owning AI features from concept through production and measuring their real-world impact
• A collaborative working style – comfortable partnering with product managers to translate customer needs into technical solutions
• Ability to communicate technical tradeoffs clearly to non-engineering stakeholders
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent professional experience
• Proven experience working on high-traffic, customer-facing web applications and applying AI technologies in consumer online products.
• A passion for continuous learning and a "test and learn" mindset

Nice To Haves

• Prior experience in a lead IC role at a SaaS company
• Experience applying AI to content engagement, search relevance, or personalization problems
• Familiarity with AI safety, evaluation, and responsible AI best practices
• Background in a media domain

Responsibilities

• Identify the highest-leverage opportunities to embed AI into our products – from intelligent content recommendations and personalization to smarter search and completely new experiences that add value to our subscribers.
• Partner closely with the Product Managers for Content Engagement and Search & Discovery to shape roadmaps, define AI-driven features, and ensure technical approaches align with subscriber and business goals
• Design and build AI-powered features end-to-end: data pipelines, model integration, APIs, and the product surfaces that subscribers interact with
• Prototype quickly, validate with real usage, and iterate toward production-quality solutions
• Establish the team's AI engineering practices – evaluation frameworks, prompt management, fine-tuning approaches, observability, and responsible AI guardrails
• Partner with subscriber success to ensure AI features solve genuine subscriber problems and drive measurable outcomes
• Act as a technical force multiplier for the broader engineering org – reviewing AI-related work, mentoring engineers, and sharing knowledge across teams
• Stay close to the rapidly evolving AI landscape and bring the right tools and techniques in at the right time

Benefits

• Build products used by millions of passionate home cooks
• Work on a modern, evolving tech stack with real-world scale and complexity
• Have meaningful influence on technical decisions without people-management overhead
• Collaborate with thoughtful, mission-driven teammates across engineering, product, data, and marketing
• Join a company that values experimentation, learning, and craftsmanship

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Associate degree