Staff Software Engineer

The position:

We're looking for a talented Staff Software Engineer to join our Agentic Platform team—the group responsible for building the company-wide infrastructure that enables every engineering team to safely build AI-powered features. This is a rare opportunity to shape foundational AI/LLM platform capabilities from the ground up at a company that's deploying real-world AI agents today.

The Agentic Platform provides shared primitives, hosted agent execution, and operational tooling so any team can build AI-powered workflows—from simple summarization to complex multi-turn conversational agents. Our vision: enable any engineer to build production-ready AI features without becoming an AI expert.

The platform handles the hard infrastructure problems—provider abstraction, safety guardrails, observability, prompt lifecycle management, and evaluation systems—so product teams can focus on their domain logic. You'll be working on:

• Agentic Platform SDK: TypeScript SDK with core primitives (Completion, Agent, Tool, Guardrail, PromptPack, Eval, Context)

• Agentic Platform Service: Agent-as-a-Service for long-running async tasks

• Prompt Management: Externalized, versioned prompt storage with CI/CD Integration

• Our production AI-powered voice and chat application—the proving ground for platform patterns

Reporting to the Director of Engineering, you'll partner closely with the Principal Engineer leading platform architecture while collaborating with product teams across the company who will consume your platform. This role is ideal for someone who thrives in technically deep problems, wants to build infrastructure that multiplies the impact of other engineers, and is excited about the rapidly evolving LLM landscape

Who you are:

You're a platform engineer at heart—someone who understands that the best infrastructure is invisible to its users while handling enormous complexity under the hood. You have a track record of designing systems that other engineers love to use, and you know how to balance powerful abstractions with practical simplicity.

You understand that LLM systems present unique challenges: non-deterministic outputs, rapidly evolving provider SDKs, safety requirements, and the need for systematic quality measurement. You're excited to tackle "churn containment"—building stable APIs that absorb the chaos of monthly model releases and quarterly SDK updates.

The ideal candidate is a hands-on, outcome-oriented engineer with extensive experience building platform infrastructure, developer tools, or distributed systems. You demonstrate a strong partnership with internal customers (other engineering teams), ensuring alignment between platform capabilities and their needs.

What you will do:

• Design and build core platform primitives including provider abstraction layers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google), structured output validation, streaming infrastructure, and token management systems

• Own safety and compliance infrastructure including composable guardrail systems, PII detection/redaction, audit logging, and privacy-first observability that never leaks sensitive data to third parties

• Build evaluation infrastructure that enables systematic quality measurement for non-deterministic LLM outputs—datasets, scorers (exact match, LLM-as-judge, schema validation), CI/CD integration, and regression detection

• Lead churn containment strategy—design provider adapters and SDK architecture that absorbs rapidly-changing LLM provider SDKs without breaking consuming applications

• Architect prompt lifecycle management systems including version control, Langfuse integration, GitHub-based review workflows, and deployment pipelines

• Design Agent-as-a-Service infrastructure for long-running async tasks using AWS EventBridge, DynamoDB, and PostgreSQL

• Collaborate with consuming teams to understand their needs, onboard them to the platform, and provide technical support

• Influence architecture, technology selections, and engineering standards across the broader organization

• Create reference implementations and technical documentation that enables other engineers to successfully adopt the platform

• Champion quality engineering practices including comprehensive testing, type safety, and observability

Required Skills & Competencies:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with significant time spent building platform infrastructure, developer tools, SDKs, or distributed Systems

• Production experience with LLM/AI systems—you've built and operated systems using OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar providers, and understand the unique challenges (token limits, non-determinism, provider outages, model deprecations)

• Strong TypeScript expertise—this is our company standard, and you'll be designing APIs that other TypeScript developers consume

• Experience designing APIs and abstractions that other engineers love to use—you understand the balance between power and simplicity

• Understanding of safety and compliance in AI systems—PII handling, guardrails, audit logging, and responsible AI practices

• Experience with event-driven architectures and async processing patterns (EventBridge, SQS, or similar)

• Understanding of observability and monitoring for distributed systems—metrics, tracing, alerting, and debugging production issues

• Strong communication and technical writing skills—ability to document systems clearly and work with internal customers across multiple teams

• Track record of technical leadership without or without formal management—influencing architecture, mentoring engineers, and driving technical decisions

• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred: Fargate, DynamoDB, RDS, S3, EventBridge)

Preferred:

• Experience building SDK or platform products consumed by multiple teams

• Experience with prompt engineering, prompt management systems, or LLM evaluation frameworks

• Familiarity with NestJS, Prisma, or similar TypeScript backend frameworks

• Experience with streaming architectures (SSE, WebSockets) for real-time AI applications

• Background in building multi-tenant platform infrastructure

• Experience with hexagonal architecture / ports and adapters patterns

• Contributions to open-source LLM tooling or frameworks

Technical Environment:

• Languages: TypeScript (primary)

• Frameworks: NestJS, OpenAI Agents SDK, Vercel AI SDK

• Databases: PostgreSQL (Prisma ORM), DynamoDB, Redis

• Infrastructure: AWS (Fargate, EventBridge, S3, Parameter Store), Docker

• Observability: Langfuse, NewRelic, Coval

• Testing: Vitest

• CI/CD: GitHub Actions, SonarQube

• LLM Providers: OpenAI, Anthropic (with architecture for additional providers)

• Coding Agents: Claude, Codex, Gemini

Compensation:

• Base Salary: $160,000 to $200,000

• Bonus: Target of 10% of annual earnings

• Benefits:

  • 401(k) plus match

  • Dental insurance

  • Health insurance

  • Vision Insurance

  • Paid Time Off

#LI-KT1

About A Place for Mom

A Place for Mom is the leading platform guiding families through every stage of the aging journey. Together, we simplify the senior care search with free, personalized support — connecting caregivers and their loved ones to vetted providers from our network of 15,000+ senior living communities and home care agencies.

Since 2000, our teams have helped millions of families find care that fits their needs. Behind every referral and resource is a shared goal: to help families focus on what matters most — their love for each other.

We’re proud to be a mission-driven company where every role contributes to improving lives. Caring isn’t just a core value — it’s who we are. Whether you’re supporting families directly or driving innovation behind the scenes, your work at A Place for Mom makes a real difference.

Our employees live the company values every day:

• Mission Over Me: We find purpose in helping caregivers and their senior loved ones while approaching our work with empathy.

• Do Hard Things: We are energized by solving challenging problems and see it as an opportunity to grow.

• Drive Outcomes as a Team: We each own the outcome but can only achieve it as a team.

• Win The Right Way: We see organizational integrity as the foundation for how we operate.

• Embrace Change: We innovate and constantly evolve.

Additional Information:

A Place for Mom has recently become aware of the fraudulent use of our name on job postings and via recruiting emails that are illegitimate and not in any way associated with us. APFM will never ask you to provide sensitive personal information as part of the recruiting process, such as your social security number; send you any unsolicited job offers or employment contracts; require any fees, payments, or access to financial accounts; and/or extend an offer without conducting an interview.

If you suspect you are being scammed or have been scammed online, you may report the crime to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and obtain more information regarding online scams at the Federal Trade Commission.

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

A Place for Mom uses E-Verify to confirm the employment eligibility of all newly hired employees. To learn more about E-Verify, including your rights and responsibilities, please visit www.dhs.gov/E-Verify.