Staff Software Engineer, AI Platform (US - Remote or Calgary)

Job Description

Job Description

Do you want to empower organizations to build smarter compensation strategies while ensuring fair pay for all employees?

Syndio is the leading pay governance and compensation intelligence platform. We help organizations make better pay decisions at every stage of the compensation lifecycle, from leveling and offers to promotions and merit. Our platform gives HR, compensation, and finance leaders the data and decision support they need to govern pay fairly, compliantly, and with confidence. We partner with many of the world's most recognized and respected enterprises, helping them implement leading-edge compensation solutions with expert guidance and analyzing pay for over 10 million employees across the world.

Join us in our mission to help companies make smarter pay decisions they can trust!

About the Role:

Syndi is Syndio's AI platform — one shared agent experience (in-product chat, Slack, Teams) serving our product lines, built on syndi-api: an agent runtime owning orchestration, tool calling, memory, RAG, evals, and observability, live in production today. The platform is young (v1 shipped this quarter), moving fast, and designed around a clear operating model: product teams contribute domain content through APIs, evals, and knowledge — the platform owns the experience.

We're hiring a staff-level engineer to take ownership of major runtime surfaces and grow into a technical owner of the platform. This is a high-autonomy role on a small team (3–4 engineers): you'll design, ship, and operate systems end-to-end, and you'll work directly with product-team owners through the platform's contribution seams.

What You'll Work On

• Core runtime surfaces of syndi-api: the agent loop, tool execution and registry, memory, context management (Python, Postgres, Claude on Vertex, GCP).
• The eval system — offline gates and online detector/judge evals written onto production traces — and its growth as product teams adopt it.
• Production operation: observability (Datadog LLM Obs), incident response, the reliability of an agent surface real customers use.
• The platform's contribution seams: reviewing product teams' tool wrappers and evals, evolving the GET /tools registry and drift-detection contract.
• Clarifying, designing, and implementing compliance and legal requirements for Syndi.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years building production backend systems; deep comfort with Python, relational stores, and cloud infra (we're on GCP/Kubernetes).
• You've built LLM-powered systems in production — an agent loop, tool-calling integration, RAG, or eval infrastructure — and have opinions from the scar tissue.
• You design for operability: legal compliance, tracing, evals, and kill switches are part of the feature, not afterthoughts.
• You can own a technical domain with light supervision: propose direction in writing with clear API specs, take review, ship, and carry the pager for what you shipped.
• Strong written communication — our operating model runs on design docs and PR review across team boundaries.
• Nice to have: experience being the platform side of a platform/product relationship; SSE/streaming systems; compliance-adjacent engineering (data minimization, auditability); prior Staff scope.

Why you'll love it here: