Staff Software Engineer - AI Native Development

Staff Software Engineer (AI-Native Development)

Team Engineering Location Hybrid (Carlsbad, CA, Marietta, GA, New York, NY), US Revised 3 Oct 2026

About Payroll Integrations

Payroll Integrations is a technology platform that powers secure data connections between payroll providers and the financial and benefits platforms that rely on payroll data. We automate retirement contributions, benefits deductions, and other payroll-based financial workflows by connecting more than 100 payroll providers with 401(k) recordkeepers, benefits platforms, and administrators, so our clients can eliminate manual data exchange.

We are an AI-forward company, and engineering is where that shows first. We are moving to an agentic-first delivery model: engineers write implementation specs and tests, and AI agents do most of the typing. AI reviews every pull request alongside a human. Vetted skills encode how we build, test, and ship so that the output is consistent whoever, or whatever, produced it. This role exists to help lead that shift.

About the role

We are hiring a Staff Software Engineer to lead AI-native development at Payroll Integrations. This is a new role and the most senior individual contributor position in engineering. Working with engineering leadership and our AI advisor, you will help set the standards for how our engineers work with AI: what good looks like, how we verify it, and where the line is. You will build the toolchain that makes agentic delivery repeatable, and you will ship production software with it yourself, across our teams, so the standards you help set are ones you have proven.

You bring deep, current knowledge of how large language models and coding agents actually behave: their strengths, their failure modes, and how to design workflows that get the former without the latter. You are as comfortable writing an eval as writing a migration, and you can explain both to a room that has written neither.

The work moves money and benefits data for real people, so we hold a high bar for correctness. A change is done when its tests prove it, not before.

This position is fully remote for candidates anywhere in the United States. We prefer people who work Eastern time hours.

What you will do

• Help set the standard. Work with engineering leadership and our AI advisor to define how Payroll Integrations builds software with AI: the workflow, the guardrails, the review bar, and what done means for agent-produced code.Standards
• Build the toolchain. Design and maintain the skills, agents, prompts, evals, and CI checks that make agentic delivery repeatable and trustworthy across teams.Toolchain
• Prove it in production. Ship features across our teams using the workflow you define, and use what you learn to improve it.Delivery
• Own correctness. Hold every change, yours or an agent’s, to clean architecture boundaries and to tests that cover the real risk: money, deductions, permissions, and integration boundaries.Quality
• Measure what works. Instrument AI-assisted delivery, from cycle time and defect rates to review findings and cost, and report plainly on what the tools are and are not doing.Standards
• Govern responsibly. Help shape policy for what data may reach which models, how AI-generated code is reviewed and attributed, and how we stay inside our security and compliance obligations.Standards
• Lead through others. Coach engineers and product managers on effective, honest use of AI, and raise the whole team’s judgment, not just its throughput.Leadership
• Decide at your level. Make and document the architecture and tooling decisions that are expensive to reverse, and push back with evidence when a request does not hold together.Leadership

What you bring

• Experience. Ten or more years building production software, including time operating at staff or principal level, with deep TypeScript or Node.js experience on a cloud platform.
• Deep AI knowledge. You understand how large language models work well enough to reason about them: context engineering, tool use and agent loops, caching, evals, and the ways models fail. You have built with them, not just used them.
• AI-native delivery. You have run an agentic workflow in production: specs that agents build from, tests they must pass, evals that catch regressions, and review that catches what looks right but is not. You can show the results.
• Standards that stick. You have set engineering standards that a team actually adopted, and you know the difference between a rule people follow and a document people ignore.
• Testing discipline. You practice test-driven development and treat coverage as a map of risk rather than a number to hit.
• Architecture. You can explain Clean Architecture or a close relative, you have designed serverless cloud systems, and you have kept business logic out of handlers and repositories under deadline pressure.
• Security awareness. You know the risks AI tooling and AI-generated code introduce, from prompt injection to leaked secrets and hallucinated dependencies, and how to guard against them.
• Communication. You write clear specs and decision records, and you can explain a technical trade-off to leadership, a product manager, or a client.

Our stack

• Backend. A TypeScript monorepo running on AWS serverless infrastructure, with infrastructure as code and automated CI/CD.
• Data. PostgreSQL, with every schema change made through versioned migrations.
• Front end. A modern Angular application with end-to-end browser testing.
• Quality. Unit tests on every change, and AI-assisted review on every pull request alongside a human reviewer.
• AI workflow. Coding agents and shared, vetted skills that encode how we build and test.
• Work and docs. Jira and Confluence.

Nice to have

• Experience in fintech, payroll, HR tech, benefits administration, or retirement
• Experience building MCP servers, agent skills, or eval harnesses that other engineers depend on
• Experience integrating with third-party APIs, SFTP file exchange, or payroll and HRIS platforms
• Angular and front-end experience
• Writing, talks, or open-source work on AI-assisted engineering
• This role is fully remote, but we would love to find someone who wants to spend some time in our Marietta, GA office

Compensation and benefits

Salary - $180,000 – $250,000

Location - Hybrid (Carlsbad, CA, Marietta, GA, New York, NY)

Time off - Unlimited PTO

Healthn - Comprehensive health benefits

Retirement - 401(k) with company match