Staff Engineer - AI

About the Role

We're looking for a forward-thinking leader who is already comfortable with the foundations of Generative AI based applications, and is now ready to be on the pulse of the field, with the critical discernment to separate fleeting trends from foundational shifts. You hold a grounded vision for the future of AI and will use that foresight to architect systems that are not just innovative today, but future-proof for tomorrow. This is a crucial engineering leadership role designed to build the robust, scalable, and reliable systems that bring Typeform’s AI vision to life.

You’ll be the key engineering leader partnering with our Data Science team. Where they research, prototype, and design the architecture of the AI components themselves, you will own the broader software architecture and hands-on implementation required to run those systems reliably and at scale in production. You will be the bridge that turns innovative AI concepts into hardened, enterprise-grade services.

This is primarily an engineering-focused role with a highly applied AI context. Your mission is to help establish the 'paved road' for AI development at Typeform, ensuring our infrastructure is as intelligent and well-crafted as the features it supports.

Things you will do:

• Architect Foundational AI Infrastructure in Partnership with Data Science. From the earliest R&D stages, you will help shape our technical approach. You'll guide critical architectural decisions (e.g., leveraging an agentic framework like LangGraph vs. building a custom solution), balancing future-proof design with implementation velocity. You'll collaborate with DS to identify and drive the creation of reusable abstraction layers—like a centralised Knowledge Base or an LLM Gateway—that accelerate development across all teams.

• Champion Software Engineering Excellence in AI. You will act as a technical mentor for engineers. You’ll apply your deep expertise in software engineering to the AI domain, codifying best practices for testing, CI/CD, and operations. A key focus will be establishing best-in-class standards for system-level observability, helping integrate DS-led evaluation frameworks into our services using tools like OpenTelemetry and ensuring consistent instrumentation across the organisation.

• Lead High-Impact, Cross-Cutting Technical Initiatives. You will translate learnings from individual projects into platform-wide capabilities. For example, you might lead an initiative to build a foundational MCP (Model Context Protocol) that enables our Copilot and future agentic experiences to leverage core Typeform services, tackling a key strategic need that sits beyond the bandwidth of a single team.

• Bridge our Python and GoLang Ecosystems. You'll reduce the friction between our AI (Python-based) and backend (Go-based) services.

• Ensure our Architecture is Ready for Future Scale. You will look beyond our current needs to ensure our infrastructure is future-proof, helping establish best practices for how we host, serve, and manage AI features, ensuring we are building for the long term.

What you already bring to the table:

We're looking for a seasoned engineer with a systems-first mindset who is passionate about building the foundations that enable incredible product experiences. You might be a great fit if you:

• Have extensive experience designing, building, and operating distributed, scalable, and resilient AI systems in production environments. You think in terms of reliability, performance, and long-term maintainability.

• Are fluent in a systems language like GoLang and also have a deep, practical understanding of the Python ecosystem, particularly in the context of production services. Experience with TypeScript is a plus.

• Have previous exposure to complex AI systems (think workflows, agentic…), as well as their evaluation and observability stack.

• Thrive in high-autonomy environments. You can take an ambiguous, high-level goal, define a clear technical direction, and bring other engineers along on the journey.

• Have a strong product mindset. You collaborate closely with Product Managers and Designers to ensure the underlying systems effectively serve customer needs and business goals.

• Lead with empathy and are a skilled mentor, communicator, and collaborator, capable of building trust and influencing technical direction across teams and with leadership.

Extra Awesome

• Deep experience with real-time systems and event-driven architectures.

• Experience building the infrastructure for conversational AI systems.

• Contributions to open-source projects, especially in infrastructure, tooling, or MLOps AIOps.

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