Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer

Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer

Actifai is seeking experienced senior full-stack software engineers.

Actifai is an artificial intelligence company. We help our customers, broadband and telecom providers, optimize their high-value, high-leverage decisions. Typically, this includes things like customer acquisition, retention, and development (upsells/cross-sells).

Actifai is part of Foundry.ai, a technology fund/studio that creates AI software companies in partnership with large global enterprises. Foundry's operating companies focus on practical applications of AI that drive immediate, measurable, and recurring improvements to financial performance. Foundry is backed by approximately $100MM in capital from leading private equity and venture capital partners.

The Position

The Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer will participate as a key team member in envisioning, designing, coding, testing and improving the products that are central to our mission as a company. They will work in continual collaboration with data scientists and partner company stakeholders.

The Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer will wear many hats. Some key challenges will include: working with a modern tech stack built on GCP with Node.js, Typescript, Terraform, Docker, PostgreSQL and Python; building new back-end and front-end features, working with UX designers to create delightful and highly-performant products; instilling best practices into the development process, including automated testing, code organization and style, and application architecture within an agile environment; evaluating potential new technologies; writing code that builds new companies and products.

Successful candidates will likely have many of the following characteristics:

• A full-stack generalist with 4+ years experience building applications
• Proven ability in writing clean, scalable code with significant experience in one or more programming languages
• Solid knowledge of programming fundamentals - algorithms, data structures, design patterns, and paradigms
• Excited to move fast and know how to prioritize and make critical decisions
• Comfortable with and curious about working outside of a traditional narrow engineering role
• Can effectively communicate software engineering issues to business professionals, and business issues to software engineers
• Proven capability in creating a successful software product; owning/implementing key decisions on features, architecture, scaling, and profitability — particularly in AI or solving a novel problem
• Experience planning and executing work modules that span several months
• Broad skillset that blurs the lines between software engineering and data science
• Exceptional computational background (e.g, significant contribution to libraries/modules and/or has a relevant PhD)
• Exceptional business background (e.g., managing client relationships and scoping projects while leading an engineering team)

Candidates should hold a very strong CS, math, physics or similar degree from a leading program. PhD applicants are actively considered. Successful candidates will be comfortable in a fluid, entrepreneurial environment, but one that is focused on developing reusable software applications, not bespoke analytical solutions.

The programming languages and tools used most frequently at Actifai are: Javascript, SQL, Python, Github, AWS, GCP, Docker, Terraform, Kubernetes, and shell scripts. We do not expect candidates to be experts in all of these, although a strong proficiency in Javascript and the ability to learn new languages as needed are common.

Actifai offers an extremely competitive compensation package, including equity, employer-covered health/vision/dental insurance (with an optional FSA), and 401k matching. Employees receive a generous PTO allowance, and can work both remotely and from our office in downtown Washington, D.C. Successful candidates will join a small team of ambitious, supportive co-workers with ample opportunities to take on responsibilities beyond their assigned role.

Finally, we highlight that excellence has no single mold, particularly in a field as rapidly evolving as AI. We're looking for excellent candidates of all backgrounds with strong business intuition and coding skills, and welcome applicants regardless of ethnic/national origin, gender, race, religious beliefs, disability, sexual orientation or age.

Actifai interviews share some common features with other technical hiring processes and have some important differences. These reflect the unique roles our employees play, which often involve early-stage development of products and environments where idea generation, product-market fit, and partner interaction may be significant aspects of their jobs.

All our roles have technical interviews that test core engineering competencies, ability to discuss technical work, formalize generic problems into a quantitative system, problem-solve, and act as part of a team.

We also ask case-study interview questions, which are less common for technical roles. Case studies are open-ended business problems that do not have set correct answers. They require the interviewee to consider the provided information, decide what is most important, and then build a structure to answer the key questions in discussion with the interviewer. We've incorporated these into our process because Actifai is, similarly, working on problems that haven't been solved before without single correct answers. These challenges require business acumen, problem-solving skills, and the ability to think on your feet and prioritize information and actions.

Our staff will often describe this unique mindset as not only wanting to write the code to solve a problem but also being able to define the problem that we are solving — and our interview process is designed to help employees showcase their skills in this vein.