Staff Engineer, AI & Agentic Development

Stavtar • Southlake, TX

19h

About The Position

StavPay is a SaaS platform that automates accounts-payable workflows, payment processing, and financial operations for hedge funds, private equity firms, fund administrators and family offices. The platform handles invoice capture, approval routing, vendor management, multi-entity accounting, and payment execution.
We are entering a new phase of product development: embedding AI and agentic capabilities directly into our platform to transform how financial operations teams work. This is the most important technical initiative at StavPay, and this role will lead it.
We are hiring a Staff Engineer to own the architecture, design, and delivery of AI-powered and agentic features across StavPay. This is not an ML research role—it is a product engineering role for someone who can take large language models, tool-use patterns, and agentic frameworks and ship them as reliable, production-grade features that financial operations teams depend on daily.
You will define how AI is integrated into StavPay: which workflows become agentic, how models interact with our domain data, how we build trust and safety into autonomous financial operations, and how we evolve the platform architecture to support these capabilities at scale.
This is a high-autonomy, high-impact role. You will work across the full stack—from prompt engineering and model orchestration to API design, data pipelines, and frontend integration—and collaborate closely with product, design, and domain experts to ship features that meaningfully change how our clients operate.

Requirements

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant time spent building production systems at scale.
• 3+ years of hands-on experience building AI/ML-powered product features—not research prototypes, but shipped, production software that real users depend on.
• Deep experience with LLM integration: prompt engineering, function/tool calling, RAG architectures, agent orchestration, and evaluation frameworks.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: system design, API design, data modeling, distributed systems, and production operations.
• Experience with at least one modern AI/agent framework (LangChain, LlamaIndex, Anthropic tool use, OpenAI Assistants, CrewAI, or similar) and a clear-eyed view of their trade-offs.
• Proficiency in Python and/or TypeScript.
• Familiarity with SQL and relational databases.
• Track record of leading technical initiatives that span multiple teams or systems, with strong written communication (RFCs, design docs, ADRs).
• Demonstrated ability to work with ambiguity—translating broad product goals into concrete technical plans and shipping iteratively.

Nice To Haves

• Experience building MCP servers or integrations, or deep familiarity with the Model Context Protocol ecosystem.
• Domain experience in FinTech, payments, accounting automation, fund administration, or financial operations.
• Experience with AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) and a philosophy for how they change engineering workflows.
• Background in building trust and safety systems for AI: content filtering, output validation, human-in-the-loop patterns, and audit logging for autonomous actions.
• Experience with Azure cloud services, SQL Server, or Azure DevOps.
• Familiarity with financial data formats and integrations: NACHA, ISO 20022, SWIFT, or accounting system APIs (QuickBooks, NetSuite, Sage).
• Prior experience at a Staff/Principal level or as a founding/early engineer at a startup where you shaped technical direction.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the core agentic infrastructure for StavPay: agent orchestration, tool-use frameworks, memory/context management, and guardrails for autonomous financial workflows.
• Define the architecture for how LLMs interact with StavPay’s domain model—invoices, approvals, vendor records, payment instructions, accounting entries—safely and reliably.
• Build and maintain MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers and integrations that expose StavPay’s capabilities as tools for AI agents and external AI platforms.
• Design patterns for human-in-the-loop oversight, approval gates, and escalation paths in agentic financial workflows.
• Lead development of AI-powered product features: intelligent invoice processing, automated approval routing, anomaly detection, natural-language querying of financial data, and predictive cash-flow analysis.
• Build and iterate on prompt chains, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, and multi-step agent workflows tailored to financial operations.
• Implement evaluation frameworks: automated testing for AI outputs, regression detection, quality scoring, and production monitoring for model-driven features.
• Own the integration layer between LLM providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.) and StavPay’s backend—model selection, fallback strategies, cost optimization, and latency management.
• Set technical direction for AI/agentic development across the engineering team. Write RFCs, architectural decision records, and technical specifications.
• Mentor engineers on AI integration patterns, prompt engineering, evaluation methodology, and safe deployment of model-driven features.
• Establish engineering standards for AI features: testing practices, monitoring, incident response, and responsible AI guidelines specific to financial data.
• Drive build-vs-buy decisions for AI tooling, frameworks, and infrastructure. Evaluate emerging tools and frameworks and make pragmatic adoption recommendations.
• Partner with product management to identify high-value AI use cases, scope MVPs, and define success criteria grounded in client outcomes.
• Work with the implementation team to understand client workflows and pain points that AI can address.
• Collaborate with security and compliance to ensure AI features meet regulatory requirements for financial data handling, auditability, and data privacy.

Benefits

• The specifics will depend on where you see the highest leverage, but examples of the kind of work we envision: Agentic AP assistant — an AI agent that can process incoming invoices, match them to POs, route for approval, flag anomalies, and draft payment instructions with human confirmation.
• Natural-language financial queries — a conversational interface that lets controllers ask questions about payables, cash positions, and vendor history without building reports.
• MCP integration layer — a set of MCP servers that expose StavPay’s core capabilities to external AI tools, enabling clients to interact with StavPay from Claude, Copilot, or their own agentic systems.
• Intelligent onboarding — AI-powered data extraction and mapping that accelerates client onboarding from weeks to days.
• Evaluation and monitoring infrastructure — automated testing, quality scoring, and production observability for every AI-driven feature.

What This Job Offers

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