Staff AI Acceleration Engineer

Dave Vs. Goliath. We're Dave.

Dave is a financial app on a mission to build products that level the financial playing field. It is redefining the financial landscape by leveraging technology to create an affordable, transparent, and user-centric access to liquidity for millions of Americans. As a leading innovator in the U.S. financial services sector, Dave's digital financial platform offers products designed to meet the credit needs of those underserved by traditional financial institutions. Dave's offerings include its flagship ExtraCash product, providing members up to $500 within minutes. The company is on track to launch several new product offerings in 2026, including a Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) option.

Dave is focused on serving Americans who are financially vulnerable or living paycheck to paycheck. Dave is leading the charge in creating a new era of credit products that prioritizes speed, affordability, and accessibility, making it the go-to financial partner for those who need it most.

The Opportunity

We're looking for a Staff AI Acceleration Engineer to define the technical foundation for how AI agents are built, connected to data, and safely deployed across Dave.

This is a highly influential individual contributor role focused on architecture, technical strategy, and platform design. You'll establish the patterns, standards, and infrastructure that enable teams across the company to build trusted AI agents on governed data. Your work will shape Dave's AI Agent Factory—the platform that makes AI development repeatable, secure, and scalable.

You'll partner closely with Data Engineering, which owns the trusted data platform, while you design the AI infrastructure that connects large language models to that data through robust governance, semantic consistency, and reusable developer tooling.

Reports to: Director, Data Platform & AI Acceleration

What You'll Build

• Define the architecture and technical strategy for Dave's AI Agent Factory, including reusable frameworks, evaluation patterns, deployment standards, and observability.
• Design the MCP server architecture and AI-ready data access layer that enables LLMs to securely reason over governed enterprise data.
• Architect integrations between AI agents and Dave's semantic layer so business definitions remain consistent across analytics, reporting, and AI experiences.
• Establish governance-by-design patterns for authentication, authorization, auditability, PII protection, and responsible AI deployment.
• Design evaluation frameworks that measure agent quality, reliability, and operational performance before production deployment.
• Partner across Engineering, Data, Security, and Product to establish technical standards that enable AI adoption across the organization.

The Impact

Your work will become the foundation every engineering team builds on as Dave scales AI across the business. By creating trusted infrastructure instead of one-off solutions, you'll help accelerate development while ensuring AI systems remain reliable, secure, and aligned with our data platform.

What We're Looking For

Required

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Information Systems, or a related technical field.
• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, platform engineering, data engineering, ML infrastructure, or AI engineering.
• Experience architecting and delivering production-grade AI platforms, LLM-powered applications, or autonomous agent systems.
• Deep experience designing systems that securely connect LLMs to structured enterprise data through APIs, semantic layers, retrieval systems, or governance frameworks.
• Experience designing MCP servers, function-calling frameworks, tool-use architectures, or similar AI connectivity patterns.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals with expertise building scalable, reliable distributed systems.
• Experience with modern data platforms and infrastructure including Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, Kafka, Python, Kubernetes, and cloud-native technologies.
• Experience establishing engineering standards for testing, monitoring, CI/CD, observability, and operational excellence.
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams without direct authority.

Nice to Have

• Experience designing AI evaluation frameworks and automated quality measurement.
• Experience with semantic layer technologies such as dbt Metrics, LookML, or similar platforms.
• Experience building internal developer platforms adopted across engineering organizations.
• Experience within fintech, banking, healthcare, or other regulated industries.
• Experience with data lineage, governance, audit, or compliance automation systems.

What Makes Someone Successful Here

You enjoy solving platform problems that unlock leverage for the entire engineering organization. You think beyond individual features and design systems that remain scalable, understandable, and adaptable over time. You balance speed with long-term maintainability and make thoughtful architectural decisions that improve both developer experience and business outcomes.

You're comfortable working in areas that are still evolving, helping shape technical direction through collaboration, experimentation, and sound engineering judgment. You build strong partnerships across teams, welcome feedback, and understand that durable platforms are created through shared ownership rather than individual heroics.

What to Expect

This role offers significant technical ownership and the opportunity to influence how AI is built across Dave. Priorities will evolve as AI capabilities mature, and you'll help define the architecture that supports those changes. We value thoughtful decision-making, collaborative problem solving, and building systems that create lasting impact.

Why Join Dave

• Build the AI platform that powers the next generation of products and internal capabilities.
• Shape company-wide technical strategy for AI infrastructure and intelligent systems.
• Partner with experienced engineers across Data, Platform, Product, and Security.
• Help deliver AI solutions that improve how Dave serves millions of members.
• Join a profitable, growing public fintech where your technical decisions have company-wide impact.

Ready to build for the underdog? Don't let imposter syndrome get in the way of an incredible opportunity. We're looking for people who can help us achieve our mission and vision, not just check off the boxes. If you're excited about this role, we encourage you to apply. You may just be the right candidate for this or other roles.

Why you'll love working here:

At Dave, our people are just as important as our product. Our culture reflects the values that guide who we are, how we work, and what we aspire to be. Daves are member-centric, helpful, transparent, persistent, and better together. We strive to create an environment where all Daves feel valued, heard, and empowered to do their best work. As a virtual-first company, team members can live and work anywhere in the United States, except Hawaii.

A few of our benefits & perks :

Opportunity to tackle tough challenges, learn and grow from fellow top talent, and help millions of people reach their personal financial goals

Flexible hours and virtual-first work culture with a home office stipend

Premium Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance plans

Generous paid parental and caregiver leave

401(k) savings plan with matching contributions

Financial advisor and financial wellness support

Flexible PTO and generous company holidays, including Juneteenth and Winter Break

All-company in-person events once or twice a year and virtual events throughout to connect with your team members and leadership team

Dave Operating LLC is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer and is dedicated to cultivating a diverse and inclusive workplace. We will consider for employment all qualified applicants and do not discriminate on any basis protected by federal, state, or local law, including the City of Los Angeles' Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance relating to an applicant's criminal history.

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