Staff AI Engineer

Nextiva

15h • $115,000 - $205,000 • Remote

About The Position

Nextiva is seeking a Staff AI Engineer for a hands-on individual contributor role at the intersection of backend and platform engineering, system architecture, AI, cloud infrastructure, and developer productivity. The role will build an internal AI platform and production-grade agentic workflows across the software development lifecycle (SDLC), as well as intelligent automation for engineering and business processes.

The engineer will work across Nextiva’s technology platform to identify high-value opportunities, architect solutions, and take them from concept through deployment, operationalization, security, observability, and scale. The position also provides technical leadership and influence across engineering teams. Success means improving engineering effectiveness, establishing reusable and secure internal AI platform capabilities, and delivering measurable business outcomes through AI and automation.

The role is open to remote candidates across the United States. Team members located within 40 miles of the Scottsdale headquarters are expected to work onsite four days per week; scheduling and flexibility are guided by the employee’s leader.

Requirements

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including designing, building, and operating complex production-scale systems.
• Hands-on experience designing and building AI/ML or generative AI solutions that reached production and/or delivered measurable business outcomes.
• Strong software architecture and system design skills, including consequential technical decisions for distributed or large-scale systems.
• Strong programming and software engineering fundamentals in one or more production languages such as Java, Python, Go, or equivalent.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs, generative AI, AI agents, or AI-enabled application architectures beyond using AI productivity tools.
• Experience taking AI solutions beyond prototypes into deployment, operationalization, monitoring, security, reliability, and scale.
• Deep hands-on experience with GCP and/or AWS designing and operating cloud-native production systems.
• Strong understanding of DevOps, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability, reliability, and production operations.
• Strong understanding of application, infrastructure, data, and AI security, and ability to incorporate appropriate controls into system architecture.
• Strong understanding of the end-to-end SDLC, developer workflows, and challenges of large software systems and codebases.
• Ability to evaluate technical trade-offs and choose technologies based on the problem, business outcome, operational requirements, and long-term maintainability.
• Strong technical judgment and ability to work effectively in ambiguous, cross-functional problem spaces.
• Ability to influence technical direction across teams without relying solely on organizational authority.

Nice To Haves

• Experience designing or implementing agentic AI systems, multi-step AI workflows, tool-using agents, or autonomous/semi-autonomous engineering workflows.
• Experience applying AI to developer productivity, software engineering, code generation, testing, code review, incident management, or other SDLC stages.
• Experience building internal developer platforms, engineering productivity platforms, or enterprise automation capabilities.
• Experience with AI evaluation frameworks, model or agent observability, prompt and context management, retrieval architectures, and production AI quality measurement.
• Experience spanning traditional software engineering and AI engineering, such as a backend, platform, or distributed-systems foundation combined with substantial hands-on AI engineering experience.
• Experience driving technical initiatives across multiple teams, systems, or organizational domains.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, deploy, and operate production-grade AI systems and agentic workflows across the SDLC and broader business processes.
• Design scalable internal platform capabilities that help teams safely and efficiently adopt AI-powered automation.
• Own solutions end-to-end, from problem definition and architecture through implementation, deployment, observability, security, scaling, and ongoing operation.
• Build integrations among AI models, agents, developer tooling, internal platforms, enterprise systems, APIs, data sources, and engineering workflows.
• Apply software engineering principles to AI systems, including modular architecture, testing, reliability, performance, maintainability, and fault tolerance.
• Design approaches for AI evaluation, observability, quality measurement, failure handling, and continuous production improvement.
• Make pragmatic architecture and technology decisions based on business outcomes, engineering constraints, risk, and total cost of ownership.
• Design and operate cloud-native production architectures and infrastructure in GCP and/or AWS.
• Partner with infrastructure, DevOps, security, architecture, and engineering teams to establish reusable patterns, technical standards, and operational guardrails for AI-powered systems.
• Understand complex software systems and large codebases to identify opportunities for AI to improve end-to-end developer workflows.
• Evaluate emerging AI models, frameworks, agent architectures, and developer technologies for their potential value to Nextiva.
• Provide Staff-level technical leadership through architecture reviews, design decisions, technical mentorship, and influence across engineering teams.
• Translate ambiguous business and engineering problems into technical strategies and executable solutions, measuring and optimizing impact using production data, user feedback, and business results.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, and telemedicine coverage options.
• Life, disability, and supplemental indemnity insurance plans.
• Flexible Time Off for salaried employees, PTO for hourly employees, paid sick time, paid parental bonding leave, and holiday pay.
• 401(k) with company match.
• Health Savings Accounts with company contributions.
• Dependent Care FSA.
• Employee Assistance Program and wellness initiatives.
• Ongoing learning and development opportunities and career advancement.
• Compensation may include base salary and/or hourly wages, incentives, or bonuses, depending on the position.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed