Senior Staff Software Engineer

About the Role

We’re looking for a Senior/Staff Backend Engineer to architect and build large scale systems that power Actively’s GTM AI agents. These agents continuously reason over real-time customer and external data, generate next-best actions, and execute them reliably across systems with humans in the loop.

In this role, you’ll design the scalable, event-driven, and fault-tolerant infrastructure that makes this intelligence possible — integrating with LLMs, orchestrating complex workflows, and ensuring every action happens with high reliability. This is a foundational role, shaping how production-grade agents operate at enterprise scale.

What You’ll Do

• Design and build the agents that power Actively’s platform. Model complex customer and business workflows into clear, reliable agent logic that reasons over streaming data, maintaining state, decides what to do next, and acts consistently across systems — continuously and at massive scale.
• Develop orchestration and workflow primitives for agent and human collaboration. Translate nuanced, long-running real-world scenarios — multi-step workflows, customer-specific rules, and human-in-the-loop actions — into well-structured agent behaviors that are predictable, maintainable, and easy to extend.
• Ensure reliability through good modeling. Design agents with clear state transitions, strong data contracts, and explicit guarantees — embedding observability and fault tolerance into their design so they behave correctly over millions of events and long-lived sessions.
• Continuously evolve agent design. Simplify complex behavior through better abstractions, documentation, and testing — ensuring agents remain reliable and comprehensible as capabilities, data volume, and concurrency grow.

Who You Are

• Experienced systems builder. You’ve designed and operated large-scale, event-driven backend systems — modeling complex, long-lived workflows into clear, maintainable, and reliable software.
• Strong backend engineer. Deep Python expertise and solid fundamentals in concurrency, transactions, and performance tuning.
• Architectural thinker. You reason about trade-offs between consistency, latency, fault-tolerance, and cost — building for correctness and adaptability.
• Product-minded. You care about usability, developer experience, and how system design translates into real customer value.
• Fluent in modern infrastructure. Familiar with streaming and workflow technologies (Kafka, Pub/Sub, Temporal-like), and data stores across relational, in-memory, and vector paradigms.
• Collaborative and pragmatic. You value iteration, clear communication, and helping others move faster without sacrificing quality.
• Curious about AI systems. You’re excited by how LLMs, retrieval systems, and agents can transform enterprise software — and you want to build the infrastructure that makes it real.

Nice to Haves

• Built or contributed to LLM-powered or agent-driven systems — such as real-time inference pipelines, context and retrieval systems, or human-in-the-loop orchestration.
• Experience scaling mission-critical systems with high reliability requirements (payments, messaging, logistics, orchestration).
• Comfort working in fast-moving, high-ambiguity environments where you balance big vision with tactical delivery.

Why Join

It’s not often that you can get in on the ground floor of a well-funded startup that’s scaling very fast. That means that instead of following a playbook, you’ll be writing it. Every single day you will be challenged to identify how we can scale and execute on it. You’ll learn what works when you succeed and what doesn’t when you fail. You'll also be in the trenches with an incredibly high caliber, low-ego group of people that are obsessed with building something great.

Benefits

• 🚀 Competitive Early-Stage Equity
• ⚕ Health, Dental, Vision Coverage
• 💡 Unlimited PTO + Recharge Days
• 🍽️ Catered Lunch on Tuesday & Friday w/ Dinners every day!
• 🍿 Fully Stocked Kitchen
• 💻 Cutting-Edge Tech & Tools
• 🌴 Annual Off-sites & Monthly Events
• 🚆 Commuter Benefits
• 🏢 Cozy Office in NYC 

 The base salary range for this full-time position based in New York is: $180,000 - $220,000.

Note on Pay Transparency:

Actively AI provides an estimate of the compensation for roles that may be hired as required by state regulations. Compensation may vary based on (a) location, as Actively AI factors in specific location when benchmarking compensation for most roles; (b) individual candidate skills and qualifications; and (c) individual candidate experience. Additionally, Actively AI leverages current market data to determine compensation, so posted compensation figures are subject to change as new market data becomes available. The salary, other compensation, and benefits information is accurate as of the date of this posting. Actively.ai reserves the right to modify this information at any time, subject to applicable law.

Actively AI is committed to equal treatment and opportunity in all aspects of recruitment, selection, and employment without regard to gender, race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, gender identity/expression, sexual orientation, veteran or military status, or any other category protected under the law. Actively AI is an equal opportunity employer; committed to a community of inclusion, and an environment free from discrimination, harassment, and retaliation.