Staff Software Engineer, Applied AI
Description
WHO WE ARE
GridUnity is the industry leader in interconnection life cycle management, delivering cutting-edge software solutions that eliminate bottlenecks in the interconnection process and accelerate the transition to a more affordable, sustainable, and resilient energy future.
Our Mission
We unite all grid interconnection stakeholders on a single platform that converts centralized data into actionable intelligence and accelerates the transition to a reliable, sustainable, and cost-efficient electric grid.
GridUnity is a trusted partner to leading utilities, grid operators, and policymakers. Our technology solutions tackle the interconnection queue backlog by significantly reducing processing times. Whether cutting transmission interconnection timelines from years to months or enabling distribution applications to be processed within a day, we help accelerate energy projects at every scale.
Our Vision
Energizing the planet with a faster, smarter, and more sustainable grid.
GridUnity is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join our Platform team, reporting to the Director of Engineering, Applied AI. You will turn our customer workflow vision into reliable capabilities .
You will be the dedicated technical leader partnering closely with Product, Design, engineering, and domain experts to discover high-value opportunities, build workflow capabilities, and help ensure we deliver measurable customer outcomes. You will own the technical approach for selected high-value workflows, collaborating with Product on prioritization, domain experts on engineering acceptance, and platform and application teams on implementation.
Responsibilities
Translate customer needs into executable workflows. Map triggers, desired outcomes, participants, evidence, decisions, exceptions, and handoffs across full workflows and their constituent tasks.
Build and ship capabilities. Implement AI-assisted experiences, typed tools, service integrations, and workflow orchestration within the existing application.
Connect the experience end-to-end. Ensure assistance leads to completed work—not disconnected chat answers, reports, or recommendations.
Extend reusable foundations. Build on our product's existing runtime, tools, personas, skills, and application services to improve reliable orchestration, resumability, grounded retrieval, and human approvals.
Lead technical execution. Decompose opportunities into deliverable increments, resolve cross-team dependencies, and guide implementation without becoming the sole implementer.
Evaluate real-world quality. Create representative scenarios and evaluations covering correctness, incomplete information, exceptions, permissions, and failure recovery.
Measure customer outcomes. Partner with Product to establish baselines and assess improvements in effort, correction cycles, throughput, and decision quality.
Preserve customer trust. Make uncertainty, evidence coverage, source versions, permitted actions, and approval boundaries explicit.
Engineer for production. Address latency, model and tool costs, observability, safe rollout, failure recovery, prompt injection, and unauthorized tool actions.
Required experience
Demonstrable experience delivering customer-facing software and leading consequential technical work across teams or services.
Hands-on experience building production AI applications that retrieve information, invoke tools, or coordinate multi-step work.
Effective at partnering with qualified experts rather than substituting AI judgment for engineering authority.
Strong software engineering skills, including APIs, structured contracts, asynchronous execution, testing, and observability.
Experience connecting AI capabilities to real application state and authorized actions—not only building conversational prototypes.
Sound judgment about where deterministic logic, AI assistance, and human decisions belong.
Experience designing evaluations and investigating failures involving incomplete data, ambiguous requirements, or unreliable model outputs.
The ability to work directly with customers and domain experts, clarify ambiguous needs, and translate them into bounded, testable solutions.
Clear communication and the ability to raise the effectiveness of other engineers through technical leadership.
Preferred experience
Electric utility, interconnection, transmission, distribution, DER, storage, or large-load workflows.
Regulated or evidence-intensive enterprise applications.
TypeScript, Node.js, React, and cloud-based service architectures.
Document processing, workflow engines, engineering-tool integration, or enterprise authorization models.
Deep electrical engineering expertise is valuable but not required.
Our technology
We build cloud-based software using TypeScript, React, Node.js, PostgreSQL, and AWS, alongside modern AI tools.
You do not need experience with every tool we use. We value sound engineering judgment and a track record of delivering reliable software that solves real customer problems.
Your first 90 days
Working with the team you will:
Learn our product and customers’ needs.
Identify a practical opportunity for AI to improve a customer workflow.
Build and test an initial solution, gather feedback, and recommend next steps.
Help establish approaches the team can reuse.
How success will be measured
Success means helping customers get important work done more easily and reliably—not simply building demos or increasing AI usage.
OUR CULTURE
We are a lean, fast-moving team that values bold thinking, reliability, and continuous learning. We operate with radical transparency, embrace scrappiness, and build solutions that anticipate customer needs. We also believe work should be fun and fulfilling — what we call “funfillment.”
The right candidate is energized by working in a scaling, mission-driven company where they can shape processes, wear multiple hats, and grow alongside the business.
BENEFITS/PERKS
Competitive compensation packages that recognize your expertise and contributions
Remote-first culture that provides flexibility and balance
Professional development opportunities, including training, mentorship, and career pathing
Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance starting day one
Short- and long-term disability and basic life insurance at no cost to you
401(k) plan with a 4% match to help secure your future
Flexible PTO and a supportive work culture that values balance
Mission-driven work with the opportunity to make a significant impact in the energy sector
ELIGIBILITY REQUIREMENT
This position may involve access to data and systems subject to U.S. critical infrastructure protection regulations. Accordingly, this role is restricted to individuals who qualify as “U.S. persons,” defined by federal law as U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents (green card holders), asylees, or refugees.
OUR COMMITMENT TO APPLICANTS
GridUnity is an equal opportunity employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, arrest and conviction record, or any other characteristic protected under applicable law.
We are committed to creating an inclusive workplace where every team member feels valued, supported, and able to bring their authentic self to work.
If you need a reasonable accommodation during the application or interview process, please email careers@gridunity.com.
For your security, all official communication from GridUnity will only come from email addresses ending in @.
Skills
As published by ashby · 33 questions · 11 written answers
Basics
Name, Email, Location
Short answers (17)
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- Are you legally authorized to work in the United States?
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Written answers (11)
- Describe a time you turned an unclear customer need into a concrete product experience involving AI or automation. How did you figure out what would actually help the user, what the system should do on its own, and where the user needed visibility or control? How did those decisions shape the agent workflow and the supporting tools or harness you built? Explain your contribution and how you checked whether the experience delivered value.
- Describe an AI-powered feature you helped ship to real users. What problem did it solve, and what did you personally build? How did you decide it was reliable enough to release—including, where relevant, when it should ask for human review or decline to act? What did you learn from actual usage, and what did you change afterward?
- This role will involve building a collection of human-reviewed examples to measure and improve our product's quality agents. Describe something comparable you have built. How did you decide what the correct judgments should be, handle reviewer disagreements, and identify agent mistakes—especially incorrect “pass” decisions? How did you use what you learned to improve the system? If you haven’t done this before, explain how you would approach it.
- Describe a testing system you personally built or extended that used AI agents. What did the agents do, and what did you design or code? Tell us about a technical challenge—such as unreliable runs, test data, environment isolation, or diagnosing failures—and how you solved it. What improved in reliability, feedback speed, or cost?
- (Job 1) Employer Name
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- (Job 1) What part of this role best relates to the work described in the role at GridUnity?
- (Job 2) What product or service did the company provide? optional
- (Job 2) What part of this role best relates to the work described in the role at GridUnity? optional
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