Sr. AI Engineer (MANTL)

Alkami Technology•Bentonville, AR

2d•$136,000 - $170,000•Remote

About The Position

Alkami is the digital sales and service platform provider for U.S. banks and credit unions. Our unified Platform integrates onboarding, digital banking, and data and marketing—each solution can stand alone, but together they deliver more—to help institutions onboard, engage, and grow relationships. As the future shifts toward Anticipatory Banking, we help data-informed bankers meet the moment with technology that drives action. Founded in 2009, we continue to be recognized for our intentional culture and tremendous growth (Best Place to Work in Fintech; Best & Brightest to Work For Nationally; and Comparably’s Best Company Culture, Best Career Growth, Best Engineering Team, and Best Places to Work in Dallas, among others). We’re building a culture where each Alkamist can perform to their highest potential, and we’re always on the lookout for the best and brightest minds. If you’re ready to experience the power of alchemy - transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary - come join one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the U.S. As a remote-first company, most of our positions can be remote in the US, except for key roles, which will be indicated in the Job Title. Follow us on Glassdoor and LinkedIn! Elixir is the internal AI platform Alkami’s revenue organization runs on today. It is less than three months old, has increasing adoption across the organization, and is currently bottlenecked by a team of one. We are about to push it across the entire Alkami org as the platform AI lives on. We need an additional engineer paired tightly with our AI Engineering lead to make that possible without creating critical single-person dependency. This is a platform engineering role for someone who has shipped production software with velocity. The ideal candidate has experienced the consequences of technical debt, is comfortable architecting systems, grew up writing heavy duty, performant, stable systems in the pre-AI coding era, and is obsessed with quality. There will be an intense onboarding period (“the bootcamp”) learning the foundations of AI engineering — propensity for learning is a key differentiator. Reporting to the AI Engineering Lead, this role sits within the Product organization and is the key role on the AI Transformation team. The role is open to candidates anywhere in the US (remote), with approximately 6-8 travel days per quarter including onsites in Plano, TX.

Requirements

5+ years of experience as a software, data, or AI engineer — the bar is “you’ve shipped production software with real users,” not pure tenure.
Fluent in Python and at least one typed language (TypeScript, C#, Java, or equivalent).
Internalized CS fundamentals: complexity analysis, recursion, algorithms, and data structures.
Practical database depth — ACID transactions, contention, indexes, and migrations in both SQL and NoSQL environments.
Has built at least one full-stack application from scratch in a modern JavaScript framework (React or Svelte).
Basic proficiency in Linux, sandboxed execution, micro-VMs, and containerization.
Trainable and coachable — works best for someone without hardened framework preferences who is excited by an intense mentorship environment.
Enthusiastic about the FDE rotation as a first project: comfortable interfacing directly with business stakeholders.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate technical concepts for non-technical audiences.
Proven ability to work cross-functionally across engineering and business teams.

Nice To Haves

Experience with AI agents, agent harnesses, durable workflows, MCP servers, and context management.
Consulting, requirements-engineering, FDE, or “upstream of engineering” experience.
Familiarity with “big data” environments (Spark, EMR).
AWS Cloud experience; banking, fintech, or compliance domain knowledge.
Hands-on experience with Convex, Vercel AI SDK, React, DSPy, or semantic search.
Open-source contributions in the AI agent or tooling ecosystem.
Experience working with SaaS offerings in financial services or high-growth technology companies.

Responsibilities

Partner with the AI Engineering lead to ship features from day one, ramping quickly into independent contributions on the Elixir platform.
Complete a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) rotation in months 1–2 — embed with a business function to learn what the platform must support by being the one who needs it.
Contribute to Elixir’s core platform: skill execution runtime, tool/MCP registry, retrieval and memory primitives, evaluation harnesses, observability and cost telemetry, and multi-model routing.
Extend the skills surface: creating, editing, version control, AI assistance, testing, benchmarking, and permissions.
Build event-driven background agents — absorb support-ticket pre-triage, ambient agents, and webhook-driven flows into Elixir as native event-driven flows.
Productize what FDEs build — extract platform-level needs so each engagement compounds rather than serializes.
Make Elixir secure for production — PII handling, access control, audit logging, evaluation gates, sandboxing, and multi-tenant isolation.
Maintain clear and proactive communication with stakeholders and cross-functional partners.
Demonstrate self-sufficiency by independently managing tasks, problem-solving, and meeting deadlines while adapting to new challenges.