Staff Software Engineer – AI Platform

Job description

About Uptempo Marketing teams at some of the world's biggest companies use Uptempo to plan, manage, and measure their spend, bringing clarity to one of the most complex, high-stakes functions in the business. We're at an exciting inflection point: AI is reshaping how marketers work, and we're building the tools that help them move faster and make smarter decisions. We're a remote-friendly team that cares deeply about doing good work, treating each other well, and building something that actually matters to our customers. The Role We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to set the technical direction for Uptempo's engineering team. This is not a senior engineer with more tenure — it's a different job. You'll define how we build, establish the standard for AI-native development, and serve as the senior technical voice in product and architectural decisions. You'll work closely with the Director of Engineering, Product leadership, and every engineer on the team. Your decisions ripple. We're looking for someone who has figured out how to operate at 10x individual velocity — not by working more hours, but by designing systems, including AI agent systems, that do the execution while your judgment remains the quality gate. What You'll Own Platform architecture. Own major architectural decisions across the platform — multi-tenancy, data modeling, API design, scalability — with full authority and full accountability. AI development leadership. Design and operate an AI-assisted development system: agent orchestration, task decomposition, output evaluation, and quality control pipelines the whole team can leverage. Engineering standards. Define the team's technical standards: code review culture, observability requirements, deployment practices, and the playbook for what AI-delegatable work looks like vs. what requires staff judgment. Team multiplier. Uplift the team — through pairing, design reviews, written RFCs, and mentorship — and raise the hiring bar by helping define what great engineering looks like for each role. Technical strategy. Serve as the senior technical voice in product planning, translating customer problems into the right architectural approaches before a line of code is written. What We're Looking For Must-haves: 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2–3 years operating at Staff or Principal level (or equivalent scope without the title) You've led the architecture of at least one platform or product that scaled to significant usage — you know what breaks and why, and you made the right tradeoffs Deep expertise in distributed systems, data-intensive applications, or multi-tenant SaaS platforms You've designed agent pipelines, managed model context windows at production scale, and built evaluation frameworks — you understand where AI-generated code introduces systemic risk You write for your audience: RFCs non-experts can evaluate, ADRs future engineers will thank you for, and technical strategy that translates to business outcomes Comfortable with brownfield development: building out public APIs for public consumption, productizing integrations, and MCP server Familiar with our tech stack: AWS, Java, Typescript with React/Angular frameworks Nice-to-haves: Track record of meaningfully improving the engineers around you, not just shipping great code yourself Experience building internal developer tooling or platform capabilities used by other engineering teams Background in marketing technology, analytics, or data-heavy SaaS products Prior experience at a PE-backed or venture-backed company through a growth phase Who You Are You're comfortable with ambiguity, energized by hard problems, and you care about shipping things that make a real difference for real people. You're also a collaborator at heart. You know that the best decisions come from pulling in diverse perspectives, and you take the time to bring people along.