Senior Software Engineer - AI Applications

About the role

We're a startup with big ambitions: to make estate planning modern, visual, and intelligent. Vanilla is the first AI-powered estate advisory platform, built by advisors, planners, and attorneys to transform how wealth is transferred across generations. Our technology unifies scenario modeling, client visualization, and document creation into one seamless, digital experience. Our team brings together diverse subject matter expertise across estate planning, wealth management, and scaling SaaS startups. We're distributed across the U.S., with a mix of fully remote and hybrid roles, and we embrace flexibility while staying closely connected. At Vanilla, you'll join curious builders and problem-solvers who thrive on speed, autonomy, and impact. Here, you won't just join a company, you'll help create it. If you're excited to tackle hard problems, move quickly, and see your work shape both an industry and a growing startup, we'd love to meet you. This role is a remote position, you must be based out of one of the following states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah or Washington Job Summary Vanilla is seeking a Senior Software Engineer - AI Applications with a strong background in software development, data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. You will be utilizing existing Large Language Models to build applied AI applications focused on producing high accuracy rates. Your software engineering skills will come into play here as you'll take ownership in constructing services to ingest structured results. If you're a proactive problem-solver who lives to disrupt archaic processes with cutting-edge technology, this is the job for you. As a Senior Software Engineer, you will work collaboratively with engineering and subject matter experts to find innovative and disruptive uses of AI to streamline (or replace) workflows.

Responsibilities

• Machine learning and AI: You are passionate and knowledgeable about the current and future state of AI.
• You will be utilizing existing Large Language Models to build applied AI applications focused on producing high accuracy rates. Your software engineer skills will come into play here as you'll take ownership in constructing services to ingest results.
• You will work with product, and engineering teams and build models/services that can ingest data, extract key information and surface insights.
• You can drive technical vision and leverage open source technologies and cloud services to build an AI/ML platform.
• You can build tooling to support model training, evaluation, inference serving, monitoring and alerting.
• You want to use the latest ML frameworks and open source tools to develop new model training pipelines.
• Hands On Coding: You have direct experience with software engineering and are familiar with modern languages like Python, Javascript, Go, Rust
• You have experience building microservices and understand the tradeoffs of the approach.
• Data handling: You can identify, extract, transform, and load data from disparate sources into a centralized system. You are able to normalize, cleanse, and validate this data.
• Database management: You are able to design and implement schemas, optimize queries, and manage database performance.
• Project management: You must be an effective self-organizer: prioritize tasks, manage resources, and communicate effectively with non-technical stakeholders.
• Collaboration: We are one team. You must be able to collaborate with engineers, subject matter experts, product managers, and designers to ensure the success of projects.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 6+ years relevant work experience.
• Proficiency in, at least, one modern programming language such as Python or Javascript.
• Experience building commercial SaaS solutions.
• Experience integrating with backend services, and APIs.
• Experience with OpenAI, Anthropic, or similar for both chat and API interfaces.
• Deep understanding of machine learning and AI technologies, including the ability to design, train, and implement machine learning models and use natural language processing techniques for automation.
• Experience with tuning AI performance and scalability of AI infrastructure.
• Preferred experience with AI observability, monitoring, and signaling with tools such as LangChain or LangGraph.
• Experienced with LLM orchestration tooling and decision frameworks.
• Experience or exposure building agentic capabilities and workflows.
• Experience or exposure to evaluation testing frameworks.
• Exceptional candidates will have direct experience with RAG for tuning LLMs.
• Experience with API design and accessing data from external sources.
• Ability to effectively articulate technical challenges and solutions.
• Deal well with ambiguous/undefined pro

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