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Staff Software Engineer - AI Platform

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Position Summary

This role is responsible for defining and building the shared AI platform that MeridianLink’s product and engineering teams use to deliver AI-powered features consistently and at scale. You will work across product domains to identify common requirements, design platform services that abstract the hard parts of AI integration, and establish the patterns and standards teams follow when building on top of AI. The right person for this role thinks in platforms, not features, and has strong opinions about what it means to make AI capabilities reliable, observable, and safe in a regulated industry.

Key Competencies

Staff engineers at MeridianLink operate across multiple teams or an entire product line. They set technical direction, make architecture and technology decisions that others build against, and raise the engineering floor across the teams they touch. Staff engineers are active, daily users of AI-assisted development tools — and go further by building the workflows, tooling, and patterns that make those tools more effective for the teams around them.

Technical Leadership & Architecture

  • Makes critical architecture and design decisions that span multiple teams or an entire product area

  • Evaluates technology choices with a clear view of trade-offs at scale, not just for the immediate problem

  • Drives technical standards and patterns that other engineers can follow without being supervised

  • Identifies systemic problems before they become incidents

  • Reasons fluently across the fundamentals of distributed systems: how systems handle load, how they store large datasets, and how they stay correct under failure

  • Treats every architecture decision as a trade-off between speed, cost, and correctness, and makes that trade-off explicit when guiding teams; sizes systems with back-of-the-envelope estimation and decides microservices versus monolith on evidence rather than default

Cross-Team Execution

  • Provides day-to-day technical direction for one or more scrum teams without holding a management title

  • Steps into ambiguous, high-stakes technical problems across teams and drives them to resolution — without being asked

  • Holds a high bar in code and design review across team boundaries

AI Platform Design & Architecture

  • Designs shared AI platform services — including model integration layers, prompt management, retrieval-augmented generation infrastructure, embedding pipelines, and vector store management — that product teams can build on without re-solving the same problems

  • Defines the reference architecture for how AI capabilities are consumed across products, including interface contracts, versioning, and deprecation strategies

  • Evaluates and selects AI infrastructure components (cloud-managed model services, orchestration frameworks, vector databases) based on reliability, cost, latency, and operational complexity at scale

AI Reliability, Safety & Observability

  • Designs evaluation and monitoring pipelines that give teams visibility into AI output quality, latency, cost, and degradation over time

  • Establishes guardrail patterns and content safety standards appropriate for a regulated financial services environment

  • Defines the platform’s approach to compliance-relevant concerns: data residency, PII handling in AI pipelines, audit logging for AI-driven decisions

Platform Adoption & Developer Experience

  • Works with product engineering teams to understand how they want to consume AI capabilities, then translates that into platform APIs and abstractions that are ergonomic and consistent

  • Builds the documentation, reference implementations, and onboarding paths that make the platform easy to adopt without hand-holding

  • Identifies where product teams are solving similar AI problems in isolation and consolidates that work into shared platform capabilities

Expected Duties

AI Platform Discovery & Design

  • Partner with product engineering teams and architects to catalog current and near-term AI use cases, identify common patterns, and define the platform services that should be centralized

  • Produce technical designs — RFCs, architecture decision records, system diagrams — for AI platform components at a level of detail that other engineers can implement and review against

  • Evaluate third-party AI infrastructure options (model providers, vector databases, orchestration frameworks) and make build-vs-buy recommendations with clear rationale

Platform Build & Standards

  • Lead development of core AI platform services: model serving and routing, retrieval infrastructure, prompt management, output evaluation, and usage observability

  • Define and enforce integration standards — API contracts, error handling patterns, cost attribution — so that product teams building on the platform do so consistently

  • Own the technical roadmap for the AI platform, prioritizing based on what unblocks the most product development and reduces the most duplicated effort

Collaboration & Growing Others

  • Develop Senior engineers toward Staff-level scope; give them problems and opportunities that stretch them, not just guidance on their current work

  • Partner with Engineering Managers and Product leadership to align technical decisions with delivery goals

  • Own the design and maintenance of technical knowledge infrastructure — RFCs, ADRs, runbooks, onboarding paths — so teams can operate without needing to escalate

Qualifications: Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

Required

  • 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with demonstrated technical leadership across multiple teams or product areas

  • Proven ability to make and defend architecture decisions at scale

  • Active daily use of AI-assisted development tools

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent experience

  • 3+ years of hands-on experience designing or building systems that integrate large language models or other ML models into production software

  • Demonstrated experience building shared platform services or internal developer platforms, not just application-level features

  • Proficiency with cloud-managed AI services (AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, or equivalent) and the operational characteristics of running AI workloads in production

  • Strong understanding of retrieval-augmented generation architectures, vector search, and embedding pipeline design

  • Experience designing systems in regulated industries where data handling, audit trails, and compliance constraints shape technical decisions

Preferred

  • Experience in fintech, banking, or other regulated financial services environments

  • Familiarity with AI evaluation frameworks and techniques for measuring output quality and detecting model degradation

  • Experience with prompt management, versioning, and experimentation at scale

  • Prior work on developer-facing platforms with a focus on adoption and internal developer experience

What Success Looks Like

In the first 90 days, this person has completed a discovery pass across our AI products teams, documented the current and planned AI use cases, and produced an initial platform architecture proposal for review by engineering leadership. Within six months, at least one core AI platform service is in production and being consumed by a product team, and the patterns for how teams integrate with AI capabilities are documented and enforced through the platform, not tribal knowledge.

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What this application asks

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Name, Email, Resume

  • Are you eighteen years of age or older? yes / no
  • May MeridianLink contact your CURRENT or MOST RECENT employer? yes / no
  • May MeridianLink Contact your PAST employers? yes / no
  • Have you ever been fired or asked to resign to avoid being fired from a job? yes / no
  • Can you perform the essential functions of this job with or without reasonable accomodation? yes / no
  • Will you now or in the future require sponsorship (i.e. H-1B visa ect.) to legally work in the United States? yes / no
  • Location
  • I understand that as permitted by law, MeridianLink will conduct an investigative consumer report. I understand the scope of this consumer report may include verification of my references, employment history, credit and indebtedness, criminal conviction history, educational and training background and other matters related to my suitability for employment. Upon timely written request to the personnel department of MeridianLink, the nature and scope of the report will be disclosed to me. If I am offered employment with MeridianLink, I understand that the offer will be conditioned on passing a pre-employment drug screen, timely submitting valid documentation that confirms my identity and authorization to work in the United States, and reading and agreeing to comply with the MeridianLink policies as stated in its Employee Handbook. I certify that the answers given by me in this employment application are true, correct and complete. I agree that the company shall not be liable, in any respect, if my employment is terminated because of misstatements or pertinent omissions made by me in this application. Moreover, I understand that all offers of employment are contingent upon passing the company's prescribed credit check and background screen. A copy of this form may be used as the original. The use of results from this form and/or tests will be used for prudent employment decisions. It is agreed and understood that completion of this application does not mean a job opening exists and in no way obligates the company to employ me. In the event of employment, I will comply with all company rules and regulations as established from time to time. I am willing to work all assigned overtime or other special work assignments as requested by the company. I also understand that MeridianLink, Inc. retains the right to amend, modify, add or delete any or all policies or procedures at its sole and absolute discretion. I understand that nothing contained herein is intended to create a contract between the company and me for either employment or the provision of any compensation or benefits. I hereby understand and acknowledge that any employment relationship with this Company is of an “At-Will” nature, which means that the Employee may resign at any time and the Employer may discharge Employee at any time, with or without notice, with or without cause. It is further understood that this ‘At-Will’ employment relationship may not be changed by any written document or by verbal agreement unless such change is specifically acknowledged in writing by an authorized Executive of this Company. During my employment with MeridianLink, Inc. and after my employment ends, I agree not to disclose any confidential or proprietary information regarding operating and trade secrets. CERTIFICATE OF APPLICANT: I certify that all statements made in this application and attachments are true, and I agree and understand that misstatements or omissions of any material fact may be cause for disqualification or dismissal from employment with MeridianLink choose one
  • Please let us know where you heard about this job opening? choose one
  • If above question is "Other" please add the source below.  written answer · optional

See also

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