Senior Gen AI Software Engineer

Role Description

Join Liftoff as a Senior Gen AI Software Engineer and help shape the future of ad tech. As a key member of our Gen AI team, you’ll design and build AI-powered products for our demand-side business, helping teams turn complex data into better decisions and meaningful customer growth.

• Own generative AI product capabilities end to end, from understanding user workflows and prototyping an approach through implementation, rollout, measurement, and ongoing improvement.
• Rapidly prototype and validate AI solutions, using focused experiments to test user value and technical feasibility, then turn what works into production-ready capabilities.
• Build agentic workflows that can reason over campaign, customer, creative, and performance data, use well-defined tools, produce structured results, and hand control back to a person when appropriate.
• Partner closely with decision makers and subject matter experts to understand their workflows, constraints, and business context, then integrate AI agents into daily work in practical and useful ways.
• Design how AI systems access and use relevant information, including the data, tools, and instructions needed to produce useful grounded results.
• Build the systems that make AI workflows reliable in production, including tool use, state management, failure recovery, and appropriate boundaries for human review.
• Define clear, testable interfaces between models and software so uncertain model behavior can be handled safely within dependable product systems.
• Develop evaluation systems that measure whether AI features accomplish the intended task, using realistic examples and an appropriate combination of automated checks and human judgment.
• Build the instrumentation needed to understand quality, adoption, business impact, latency, cost, and failure modes in production.
• Apply appropriate safeguards for customer data, system access, and high-impact workflows.
• Build the Python services and TypeScript and React interfaces that turn these capabilities into cohesive products for customer facing teams.
• Evaluate new models and techniques pragmatically, adopting them when they materially improve product quality, capability, speed, or cost.
• Mentor other engineers and help establish shared practices for designing, testing, and operating AI-powered products.

Qualifications

• Minimum Bachelors Degree and 8 yrs of relevant experience.
• You are a seasoned software engineer who has built and operated meaningful production products, ideally including zero-to-one work spanning backend services, data, and user interfaces.
• You have shipped LLM-powered or AI-assisted products beyond a demo and understand the practical challenges of reliability, context, tool use, provider changes, latency, cost, and changing model behavior.
• You are highly proficient in Python and comfortable working in TypeScript and React, with strong fundamentals in API design, data modeling, SQL, and testing.
• You understand how to build the broader system around a model, including its data, tools, instructions, permissions, feedback loops, and measures of quality.
• You can define success criteria, investigate failures, and use testing, feedback, and production signals to improve AI experiences over time.
• You exercise strong product and engineering judgment, choosing when a problem calls for traditional software, an LLM-powered approach, or a thoughtful combination of both.
• You communicate complex technical ideas clearly and collaborate effectively with domain experts and non-technical partners.
• You are comfortable working through ambiguity, making informed decisions with incomplete information, and changing direction when evidence shows a better path.
• You are a lifelong learner with strong but flexible opinions, and you thrive on giving and receiving constructive feedback.

Requirements

• Helpful, but not required: Experience as an early engineer, startup founder, or in a similarly high-ownership environment where you moved quickly from ambiguous problems to shipped products.
• Experience with advertising technology, campaign optimization, performance marketing, analytics products, or other data-rich B2B software.

Benefits

• Full compensation package that includes equity and health/vision/dental benefits associated with your country of residence.
• Base compensation will vary based on the candidate's location and experience.
• Base salary ranges for multiple levels:
• SF Bay Area, Los Angeles/Orange County, NYC, Seattle: $230,000 - $270,000
• All other cities and towns in our approved states: $211,000 - $248,000