Senior AI Software Engineer

CarParts.com•Long Beach, CA

3d•Onsite

About The Position

This is a forward-deployed engineering role with AI at its core. You will architect systems, write production-grade code, design databases, and own your projects end to end — with a primary focus on deploying AI capabilities directly into the business and products that serve real users. What defines this role is the expectation that you bring strong engineering fundamentals together with a hands-on, deployment-first mindset for AI-powered tools and workflows. You are not required to be an AI researcher or an ML specialist. You are expected to be an excellent engineer who deploys AI where it creates real value — using it to accelerate delivery, build intelligent features, and solve hard problems, while applying your own judgment to validate, refine, and own the outcome.

Requirements

3–6 years of professional software engineering in a production environment, with a portfolio of real systems you have owned and shipped.
Strong proficiency in one or more of: Python, Java, TypeScript, Go, or C#. Depth matters more than breadth.
Solid grasp of OOP, SOLID principles, design patterns, and how to make architectural decisions with long-term maintainability in mind.
Confident with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) — schema design, indexing, query optimization, and transactions. Working knowledge of at least one NoSQL store (MongoDB, Redis, DynamoDB).
Experience designing and consuming RESTful APIs; comfortable reading and writing service contracts and integration documentation.
Writes meaningful unit, integration, and end-to-end tests — not for coverage metrics, but for genuine confidence in your code.
Familiar with at least one major cloud platform (AWS, GCP, Azure), Docker, CI/CD pipelines, and basic infrastructure practices.
Strong Git workflow: branching strategies, pull requests, and code review culture.
Actively uses AI coding assistants in day-to-day development and can demonstrate concrete productivity or quality improvements as a result.
Has built or integrated at least one LLM-powered feature or workflow in a real project — even if exploratory or side-project experience counts.
Understands the basics of prompt design, few-shot examples, and how to get reliable, structured outputs from LLM APIs.
Applies engineering discipline to AI outputs — tests them, validates them, and knows when not to trust them.
Genuinely interested in how AI tooling is evolving and proactively experiments with new approaches.

Nice To Haves

Experience building RAG pipelines or working with vector databases (Pinecone, pgvector, Weaviate, etc.).
Familiarity with AI frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, or similar orchestration tools.
Exposure to ML concepts: embeddings, model evaluation, fine-tuning, and working with data science teams.
Experience with observability and monitoring tooling (Datadog, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, or equivalent).
Background in microservices architecture and event-driven systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ, etc.).
Knowledge of security best practices: OWASP Top 10, authentication/authorization, input validation.
Experience with Agile/Scrum methodologies and tools like Jira or Linear.
Open-source contributions or public portfolio demonstrating your engineering work.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and maintain scalable, high-quality software systems and APIs that serve real users in production.
Write clean, well-structured code with appropriate test coverage — unit, integration, and end-to-end.
Architect and optimize relational and non-relational database schemas, queries, and data models for performance and reliability.
Conduct meaningful code reviews that improve team quality and share knowledge, not just catch syntax errors.
Debug, profile, and resolve performance bottlenecks and production issues with urgency and rigor.
Contribute to technical architecture decisions — propose solutions, evaluate tradeoffs, and document outcomes.
Participate actively in Agile ceremonies: sprint planning, standups, retrospectives, and backlog refinement.
Deploy AI solutions end-to-end — from identifying the right use case, to building and shipping LLM-powered features directly into products and internal workflows.
Incorporate LLM APIs and AI frameworks into product features where they create genuine user value: search, summarization, recommendations, intelligent automation, and decision support.
Apply critical engineering judgment to evaluate, refine, and validate all AI-generated outputs before they reach production — you own the result, not just the prompt.
Use AI coding assistants (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code) as a daily accelerator — and champion effective AI tool patterns and prompt strategies across the team.
Stay at the front edge of the AI tooling landscape — evaluate new models, frameworks, and techniques and bring back deployment-ready recommendations that move the business forward.
Partner with Marketing, Customer Experience, Data Science, Merchandising, Warehouse Ops, and Finance to understand requirements and deliver technical solutions.
Translate technical concepts clearly for non-technical stakeholders — written documentation, presentations, and live discussions.
Present project outcomes and architectural decisions to senior leadership with confidence and clarity.
Contribute to a culture of knowledge sharing: write internal documentation, run team demos, and mentor peers.