Staff Software Engineer (AI-Native Platform)

Who We AreJoin a team that puts its People First! Since 1889, First American (NYSE: FAF) has held an unwavering belief in its people. They are passionate about what they do, and we are equally passionate about fostering an environment where all feel welcome, supported, and empowered to be innovative and reach their full potential. Our inclusive, people-first culture has earned our company numerous accolades, including being named to the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For® list for eleven consecutive years. We have also earned awards as a best place to work for women, diversity and LGBTQ+ employees, and have been included on more than 50 regional best places to work lists. First American will always strive to be a great place to work, for all. For more information, please visit www.careers.firstam.com.

What We DoRemote Work Welcome
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.

What You'll DoDrive 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.

What You'll Bring

• 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

Ideally, You'll Also Have Experience With

• 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

Pay Range: $148,600.00 - $198,200.00 Annually
This hiring range is a reasonable estimate of the base pay range for this position at the time of posting. Pay is based on a number of factors which may include job-related knowledge, skills, experience, business requirements and geographic location.

First American will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with arrest or conviction records, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws (e.g., the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act).

First American intends to conduct a review of an applicant’s criminal history in connection with a conditional offer. First American reasonably believes that a criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following material job duties for this position potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment: handling of confidential, proprietary or trade secret information belonging to First American or its customers, administrating or facilitating financial transactions, and the ability to meet customer-imposed criminal history requirements.

What We OfferBy choice, we don’t simply accept individuality – we embrace it, we support it, and we thrive on it! Our People First culture is inclusive for all employees - not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it's the key to our success. We are proud to foster an authentic and inclusive workplace For All. You are free and encouraged to bring your entire, unique self to work. First American is an equal opportunity employer in every sense of the term.

Based on eligibility, First American offers a comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, vision, 401k, PTO/paid sick leave and other great benefits like an employee stock purchase plan.