Staff Software Engineer

Lily AI is a female-founded retail AI company empowering retailers and brands by bridging the gap between merchant-speak and customer-speak. Leveraging computer vision, natural language processing, machine learning, and vertical-specific large language models (LLMs), the Lily platform enhances customer shopping experiences by analyzing product catalogs and automatically enriching the assortment with the natural language consumers actually use when they search and shop. The platform then distributes the optimized data across a retailer’s entire ecosystem from their website to Google Ads and beyond, ultimately delivering upwards of 9-figure revenue lift through improved product attribution, enhanced discovery, increased traffic and higher conversion. Learn more at www.lily.ai. 

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will design and develop scalable platforms and services focused on driving business impact, while raising the bar for technical excellence. You will be part of a team that is in charge of developing the core Product Content Optimization platform, tackling challenges of scale, data integrations, and building a performant backend infrastructure with complex workflows that delivers exceptional user experiences.

Your day-to-day will include: 

• Design, architect and implement APIs and platform services that are reliable, performant, and scalable to handle large volumes of data and customers
• Engage in architectural discussions, influence the roadmap, and take ownership of key projects and initiatives
• Technically lead, mentor and provide guidance to team members to optimize current designs, data models, workflows, and APIs.
• Work cross-functionally with engineering leaders, product managers, ML scientists and other stakeholders to build end-to-end solutions
• Champion best practices in design, coding, testing, monitoring and documentation
• Maintain high operational awareness of our entire platform, lead and participate in assessing and resolving incidents.

• 10+ years of software engineering experience 
• Proficiency in Java, J2EE, REST, Web Services and experience optimizing various data storages, including relational and document databases.
• Deep understanding of microservice architectures, containers, orchestration systems, stream processing systems (like Kinesis, Kafka)
• Experience scaling backend architectures and monitoring production health and costs.
• Experience working with Agentic AI, RAG and LLMs.
• Strong product sense, with the ability to make well-reasoned tradeoffs between speed and quality to create an enduring platform.
• Exceptional attention to detail and analytical skills, with the ability to detect and diagnose anomalies, errors, or issues.
• Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate in an energetic cross-functional group
• Ability to mentor and elevate the skills of your team members

Currently, we are hiring from the below US states, Canada and Latin America – (candidates must be currently residing in Canada, Latin America or the following US states or open to relocating):

• Alabama
• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut 
• Florida
• Georgia
• Illinois
• Indiana
• Massachusetts
• Minnesota
• Nevada
• New Jersey
• New York
• North Carolina
• Oregon
• Pennsylvania
• Rhode Island
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Utah
• Virginia
• Washington

Compensation is competitive and will be determined based on a combination of experience, seniority, internal, external equity and location. For some context: this position in the US would pay between $180,000 - $240,000 USD per year, depending on experience and seniority. In other regions, compensation will be adjusted for local currency and local market rates. Lily AI compensation policy is calculated with a focus on equity and ownership.