Staff AI Engineer

Staff AI Engineer

At Tango Analytics, we’re all about helping businesses make smarter decisions through powerful technology, insightful data, and a whole lot of collaboration. Whether you're a creative thinker, a strategic planner, a tech wizard, or a customer champion, there's a place for you on our team. We believe work should be meaningful and fun—so if you're ready to make a difference while enjoying the journey, come join us and let's Tango!

Tango is building an AI-native operating model across every function (Go-To-Market, Tech, Finance, HR/Legal, and Services). The Staff AI Engineer is the first hire on the central AI Transformation team and the builder behind Tango’s AI Lab.

The role reports to the Head of AI Transformation and works directly across all internal functions to land AI in real workflows, not just in demos.

Key Responsibilities:

• Build and ship internal AI tools and automations across function clusters (Finance/RevOps and Go-To-Market first) sequenced to where the business impact is highest.
• For each shipped tool, define a named owner function, a measured baseline, and a per-tool annualized value target.
• Before building, challenge whether buying is the better path. Bring a clear build-versus-buy recommendation for every tool, and only build when the case for build is stronger than the case for buy.
• Establish eval harnesses, monitoring, and guardrails for each shipped tool, covering accuracy, safety, cost, and latency.
• Direct an autonomous coding agent (Devin or equivalent) as a backlog-driven contributor; orchestrate the agent’s work alongside your own coding rather than treating it as a coding-assistant only.
• Maintain and continuously upgrade a personal AI-engineering setup (e.g. Claude Code, MCP servers, custom skills, worktrees, multi-agent workflows) and share patterns that raise the productivity of other Tango engineers.
• Partner with Tango’s broader Engineering organization (Product Engineering, Platform, Data) to design and build the reusable AI platform layer: eval frameworks, retrieval stacks, model gateways, guardrails, and AI FinOps (model spend, usage attribution, cost and latency budgeting) that any team at Tango can pick up.
• Drive shared AI architecture decisions across teams; reconcile build-versus-buy choices on model providers, hosting options, and vector infrastructure with the rest of Engineering rather than in isolation.
• Track frontier-model capability and select what is actually useful for Tango; partner with Security, Legal, and Compliance on AI governance patterns including data handling, prompt-injection defense, and PII safety.
• Embed with Finance/RevOps and Go-To-Market tiger teams in sequence; AI work has to land inside each function’s workflow, not as an isolated central-team output.
• Pair with function leaders to identify the highest-leverage AI use cases, then ship them; raise the AI literacy of each function through brown bags, working sessions, and review feedback.

About You:

• 8+ years of professional software-engineering experience, including 4+ years shipping AI-powered features or AI-native tools to production.
• SaaS start-up experience is highly desired (building the Labs function from scratch)
• AI-first, Claude-Code-first workflow. Your primary day-to-day workflow is built around Claude Code or an equivalent agentic coding tool—it is your default starting point for every task, not a tab-autocomplete add-on.
• Literate in agentic-tooling beyond coding agents. Hands-on experience with at least one autonomous coding-agent or AI-engineer platform such as Devin, Manus, Aider, or equivalent, and the ability to articulate where these platforms help and where a human engineer is still required.
• Multi-agent workflow habits. Comfortable running multiple AI sessions in parallel, maintaining personal skills and MCP servers, and orchestrating an agent backlog rather than coding linearly.
• Production experience with LLM APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI), including prompt design, RAG, function calling / tool use, evals, prompt caching, and reasoning about cost / latency / safety trade-offs.
• Strong general software-engineering fundamentals. You can write code without AI when needed, debug production failures, and reason about correctness, concurrency, and data flow at the level expected of a Staff engineer.
• Demonstrated ability to embed with non-engineering teams (Finance, GTM, Operations, HR, Legal) and translate business problems into AI-assisted workflows.
• Pace of adoption and a learn-out-loud disposition. AI tooling moves weekly; you keep up and share what you learn with the broader Engineering organization.
• Prior experience standing up an internal AI platform, AI lab, or “AI for internal employees” function at a previous company.
• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, or a related field.

What We Offer:

• Competitive Compensation We recognize and reward your contributions with a salary package that reflects your value.
• Comprehensive Benefits Including health, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan with company match, and generous paid time off to support your well-being.
• Flexible Work Environment Whether remote, hybrid, or in-office, we support work arrangements that promote productivity and balance.
• Inclusive & Collaborative Culture We foster a workplace where diverse perspectives are valued, teamwork is encouraged, and everyone has a voice.

Tango is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to equal opportunity regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, parental status, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, disability, or veteran status.

Base pay offered is contingent on qualifications and other operational considerations. Base pay is just one piece of the full compensation structure offered at Tango. If this pay range is outside of your expectations, we still encourage you to apply and have a conversation with us.

Base pay offered for this position is: $170,000 - $220,000

*Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S. for any employer.

*We cannot sponsor employment-based visas at this time.