Staff AI Engineer

Location: While this role is open to remote candidates across the United States, team members located within 40 miles of our Scottsdale headquarters (9451 E. Via de Ventura, Scottsdale, AZ 85256) are expected to work onsite four days per week to support collaboration, speed, and execution. Specific scheduling and flexibility will be guided by your leader to support both team collaboration and individual productivity.

Nextiva is looking for a Staff AI Engineer to help build an internal AI platform that will shape how we work across engineering and the broader organization.

This is a Staff-level, hands-on individual contributor role at the intersection of backend/platform engineering, system architecture, AI, cloud infrastructure, and developer productivity. You’ll design and build production-grade agentic workflows across the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and intelligent automation that improves engineering and business processes across Nextiva.

Working across Nextiva’s technology platform, you’ll identify high-value opportunities, architect solutions, and take them from concept through deployment, operationalization, security, observability, and scale. You’ll also provide technical leadership and influence across engineering teams.

We are looking for an engineer who understands that AI is a means to a business outcome—not the outcome itself and can turn promising capabilities into reliable systems that create measurable value.

Top 3 Outcomes (first 12 months)

1. Build and operationalize agentic SDLC capabilities: Architect and deliver production-grade AI workflows that materially improve how Nextiva engineers design, build, test, review, deploy, operate, and maintain software, with measurable improvements in engineering effectiveness.
2. Establish a scalable internal AI platform: Develop reusable architecture, services, infrastructure, patterns, and guardrails that enable AI-powered workflows to move reliably from experimentation into secure, observable, production-scale operation.
3. Deliver measurable business impact through AI and automation: Identify and execute high-value automation opportunities across engineering and business processes, establishing clear success metrics and demonstrating tangible improvements in productivity, quality, velocity, cost, or customer outcomes.

Key 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 enable teams across Nextiva to 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 robust integrations between AI models, agents, developer tooling, internal platforms, enterprise systems, APIs, data sources, and engineering workflows.
• Apply strong 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 improvement in production.
• Make pragmatic architectural and technology decisions based on business outcomes, engineering constraints, risk, and total cost of ownership rather than technology trends.
• Work deeply within GCP and/or AWS, designing cloud-native architectures and infrastructure capable of supporting secure, reliable, scalable production workloads.
• Partner with infrastructure, DevOps, security, architecture, and engineering teams to establish reusable engineering patterns, technical standards, and operational guardrails for AI-powered systems.
• Understand complex software systems and large codebases to identify opportunities where AI can improve developer workflows across the end-to-end SDLC.
• Evaluate emerging AI models, frameworks, agent architectures, and developer technologies to determine where they can create meaningful value for 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 clear technical strategies and executable solutions, measuring and optimizing impact based on production data, user feedback, and business results.

Requirements

Must-have

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with demonstrated experience designing, building, and operating complex production-scale systems.
• Demonstrable hands-on experience designing and building AI/ML or generative AI solutions that have reached production and/or delivered measurable business outcomes.
• Strong software architecture and system design skills, including experience making 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 working with LLMs, generative AI, AI agents, or AI-enabled application architectures, beyond simply consuming 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, including designing and operating cloud-native production systems—not solely familiarity with cloud services or consoles.
• Strong understanding of DevOps, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability, reliability, and production operations.
• Strong understanding of application, infrastructure, data, and AI security considerations and the ability to incorporate appropriate controls into system architecture.
• Strong understanding of the end-to-end software development lifecycle, developer workflows, and the challenges of working within large software systems and codebases.
• Ability to evaluate technical trade-offs and select technologies based on the problem, desired business outcome, operational requirements, and long-term maintainability.
• Strong technical judgment and the ability to operate effectively in ambiguous, cross-functional problem spaces.
• Ability to influence technical direction across teams without relying solely on organizational authority.

Preferred

• 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 stages of the SDLC.
• Experience building internal developer platforms, engineering productivity platforms, or enterprise automation capabilities.
• Experience with AI evaluation frameworks, model/agent observability, prompt and context management, retrieval architectures, and production AI quality measurement.
• Experience spanning traditional software engineering and AI engineering—for example, a strong backend, platform, or distributed-systems engineering foundation combined with substantial hands-on AI engineering experience.
• Experience driving technical initiatives that span multiple teams, systems, or organizational domains.

Tools & Tech Stack

The exact stack will evolve as we select technologies based on the problems and outcomes we are solving. Relevant experience may include:

• Cloud: GCP and/or AWS
• Languages: Java, Python, Go, and/or equivalent production engineering languages
• AI: LLMs, generative AI, agentic frameworks and architectures, model APIs, evaluation and observability tooling
• Platform & Infrastructure: Containers, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, cloud-native services
• Engineering: APIs, distributed systems, event-driven architectures, observability and developer tooling
• Security: Cloud security, identity and access management, secrets management, secure application and AI architecture

Nextiva DNA (Core Competencies)

Nextiva’s most successful team members share common traits and behaviors:

• Drives Results: Action-oriented problem solvers who quickly bring clarity and simplicity to ambiguity, challenge the status quo, and lead meaningful change; celebrating wins to fuel momentum. They act swiftly and pragmatically, learning and improving as they go.
• Critical Thinker: Data-driven, forward-thinking individuals who identify key drivers, anticipate risks, and deliver clear recommendations. They confidently leverage AI and automation to reduce friction, improve decision-making, and focus on higher-value work.
• Right Attitude: Collaborative, competitive, and resilient team players who jump in to solve tough problems, learn from setbacks, and foster a culture of service, respect, and care for customers and teammates.

Our Total Rewards offerings are designed to allow Nexties to take care of themselves and their families so they can be their best, in and out of the office. 

Our compensation packages are tailored to each role and candidate's qualifications. We consider a wide range of factors, including skills, experience, training, and certifications, when determining compensation. We aim to offer competitive salaries or wages that reflect the value you bring to our team. Depending on the position, compensation may include base salary and/or hourly wages, incentives, or bonuses. 

The expected hiring range is $115,000- $205,000. A different level in the job hierarchy may apply to a specific candidate, resulting in a different hiring range. 

• 🍏 Health: Multiple health plan options to suit your needs, including medical, dental, vision, and telemedicine coverage 
• 💼 Insurance: Life, disability, and supplemental indemnity plans 
• ⚖️ Work-Life Balance: Flexible Time Off for salaried employees, PTO for hourly employees, Paid Sick Time, Paid Parental Bonding Leave, and holiday pay
• 💰 Financial Security: 401(k) with company match, Health Savings Accounts with company contributions, Dependent Care FSA 
• 🤸‍ Wellness: Employee Assistance Program (EAP) and comprehensive wellness initiatives 
• 🌱 Growth: Access to ongoing learning and development opportunities and career advancement 

At Nextiva, we're committed to supporting our employees' health, well-being, and professional growth. Join us and build a rewarding career!  

Nextiva is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. Nextiva participates in the E-Verify Program where and as required by law. For additional information about E-Verify visit USCIS. 

#LI-AK1 #LI-Remote