Staff Software Engineer (AI-Native Platform)

First American•Santa Ana, CA

1d•$148,600 - $198,200•Remote

About The Position

Be part of a transformative engineering organization shaping how First American builds and delivers world-class AI-native technology products that power the real estate industry. We are looking for exceptional engineers who thrive in ambiguity, influence without authority, and create technical leverage across teams. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will provide technical leadership across multiple engineering teams, driving architecture, engineering standards, and reusable platforms that enable teams to build intelligent software faster, safer, and more consistently. You will partner with engineering leaders, product management, architects, and AI practitioners to solve complex technical challenges that span products and organizations. You will play a critical role in modernizing our platform through cloud-native architecture, shared engineering platforms, and production AI systems that improve both customer outcomes and engineering velocity.

Requirements

8+ years of experience designing and building production software systems, including significant experience leading large-scale technical initiatives
Demonstrated experience driving architecture across multiple teams, services, or business domains
Deep experience building cloud-native distributed systems using modern software engineering practices
Experience designing and operating production AI systems, including LLM-powered applications and agentic workflows
Strong experience creating reusable engineering platforms, frameworks, libraries, or shared infrastructure adopted across multiple teams
Expertise designing APIs, event-driven architectures, and highly available distributed systems
Experience establishing engineering standards, architectural patterns, and operational best practices across organizations
Demonstrated experience leading technical direction through influence rather than direct management
Deep understanding of AI operational concerns including evaluation strategies, model selection, latency optimization, cost management, observability, governance, and safety
Experience designing AI development workflows that improve engineering productivity through responsible use of AI-assisted development tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or similar
Strong understanding of software architecture, cloud infrastructure, reliability engineering, and platform design
Excellent communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences
Proven ability to mentor senior engineers and elevate engineering organizations through coaching and technical leadership
Strong systems thinking with an outcome-oriented mindset focused on creating durable organizational leverage

Nice To Haves

Enterprise AI platforms (OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks)
C# (.NET), Python, TypeScript, Go, Java, or similar languages
Kubernetes, Docker, and modern platform engineering practices
Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, CDK, or similar tooling
Observability platforms including OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or similar
Large-scale platform modernization or cloud migration initiatives
Highly regulated industries such as Financial Services, Insurance, Healthcare, or similar

Responsibilities

Drive Cross-Organization Technical Strategy: Lead technical initiatives that span multiple teams, products, and domains. Define architectural direction, align engineering organizations around common approaches, and guide long-term technical investments that improve organizational scalability, reliability, and developer productivity.
Navigate ambiguity, resolve competing priorities, and build consensus across engineering, product, and business stakeholders.
Build with AI: Design and evolve the AI development practices and help drive the creation of AI powered products for our. AI is not just transforming how we build, it changes what we build. We are looking for a Staff Engineer who can help mentor teams on both.
Architect Complex Distributed Systems: Define architecture for large-scale, distributed systems spanning multiple services, domains, and business capabilities.
Drive architectural consistency around: APIs, event-driven systems, cloud infrastructure, reliability, security, observability, operational excellence.
Simplify complex systems through thoughtful abstractions and reusable patterns.
Raise the Engineering Bar: Establish engineering standards that improve software quality across the organization.
Lead architectural reviews, influence design decisions, and help engineering teams make pragmatic tradeoffs between speed, simplicity, scalability, reliability, and cost.
Champion modern engineering practices including AI-assisted software development, automated testing, observability, continuous delivery, and platform engineering.
Mentor Technical Leaders: Multiply the effectiveness of senior engineers and technical leads through coaching, architectural guidance, and design mentorship.
Help engineers grow their system thinking, technical judgment, and decision-making while creating an engineering culture centered on curiosity, ownership, and continuous improvement.
Drive Operational Excellence: Lead initiatives that improve organizational reliability, resiliency, security, and operational maturity.
Define engineering patterns for: observability, production diagnostics, AI evaluation, latency budgets, cost optimization, incident response, resiliency, governance.
Establish measurable engineering standards that improve the health of production systems over time.
Collaborate Across the Organization: Partner closely with engineering leadership, product management, solution architecture, security, platform engineering, infrastructure, and AI practitioners to translate business strategy into scalable technical solutions.
Influence decisions through technical expertise, data, and strong communication rather than organizational authority.