Staff Software Engineer, AI Platform (US - Remote or Calgary)

Do you want to empower organizations to build smarter compensation strategies while ensuring fair pay for all employees?

Syndio is the leading pay governance and compensation intelligence platform. We help organizations make better pay decisions at every stage of the compensation lifecycle, from leveling and offers to promotions and merit. Our platform gives HR, compensation, and finance leaders the data and decision support they need to govern pay fairly, compliantly, and with confidence.

We partner with many of the world’s most recognized and respected enterprises, helping them implement leading-edge compensation solutions with expert guidance and analyzing pay for over 10 million employees across the world.

Join us in our mission to help companies make smarter pay decisions they can trust!

About the Role:

Syndi is Syndio's AI platform — one shared agent experience (in-product chat, Slack, Teams) serving our product lines, built on syndi-api: an agent runtime owning orchestration, tool calling, memory, RAG, evals, and observability, live in production today. The platform is young (v1 shipped this quarter), moving fast, and designed around a clear operating model: product teams contribute domain content through APIs, evals, and knowledge — the platform owns the experience.

We're hiring a staff-level engineer to take ownership of major runtime surfaces and grow into a technical owner of the platform. This is a high-autonomy role on a small team (3–4 engineers): you'll design, ship, and operate systems end-to-end, and you'll work directly with product-team owners through the platform's contribution seams.

What You'll Work On

Core runtime surfaces of syndi-api: the agent loop, tool execution and registry, memory, context management (Python, Postgres, Claude on Vertex, GCP).

The eval system — offline gates and online detector/judge evals written onto production traces — and its growth as product teams adopt it.

Production operation: observability (Datadog LLM Obs), incident response, the reliability of an agent surface real customers use.

The platform's contribution seams: reviewing product teams' tool wrappers and evals, evolving the GET /tools registry and drift-detection contract.

Clarifying, designing, and implementing compliance and legal requirements for Syndi.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years building production backend systems; deep comfort with Python, relational stores, and cloud infra (we're on GCP/Kubernetes).
• You've built LLM-powered systems in production — an agent loop, tool-calling integration, RAG, or eval infrastructure — and have opinions from the scar tissue.
• You design for operability: legal compliance, tracing, evals, and kill switches are part of the feature, not afterthoughts.
• You can own a technical domain with light supervision: propose direction in writing with clear API specs, take review, ship, and carry the pager for what you shipped.
• Strong written communication — our operating model runs on design docs and PR review across team boundaries.
• Nice to have: experience being the platform side of a platform/product relationship; SSE/streaming systems; compliance-adjacent engineering (data minimization, auditability); prior Staff scope.
• Why you'll love it here: 💰 Competitive Compensation. For this role our salary is targeted at $205-225k USD or $180-200k CAD per year. Final offer amounts are determined by factors such as experience and expertise.
• 🏆  Syndio Equity. So you can share in Syndio’s success
• 🏝  Flexible Vacation Policy. We encourage our team to recharge when they need to (up to 20 days PTO in Canada) plus paid sick & safe time, compassion leave, and voting leave.
• 🩺  Medical, Dental, Vision. Syndio pays 90% of employee premiums, and 50% for dependents.
• 🏥  Life Insurance & Disability. Syndio covers the full premium.
• 📍Remote-first in US + Alberta; in Calgary, non-mandatory office available #LI-Remote
• Role Progession
• First 30 days
• : Focus on onboarding, mastering our core agent runtime surfaces, and shipping a small-scale contribution to understand the platform's contribution seams.
• First 60 days
• : Independently manage core runtime surfaces, troubleshoot complex issues, and start co-owning a consumer team's integration from API design to eval sign-off.
• First 90 days
• : Concretely ship a major runtime capability end-to-end (e.g., multimodal input or a new channel surface), take on-call for the platform, and co-own a consumer team's integration from API design to eval sign-off.
• The interview overview
• Below you'll find an outline of the interview plan for our Staff Software Engineer (AI Platform) position. Please note that this is what we expect the process to look like; we may ask you for supplemental information or require an additional step before making a final decision.
• Recruiter Screen (25 min)
• Meet the Hiring Manager (30 min)
• Technical Discussion - LLMs (60 min)
• Take-Home Assignment
• THA Exercise Review (60 min)
• Technical Discussion - Architecture/Engineering (60 min)
• Executive Interview (30 min)