Staff Software Engineer - AI Applications - Remote

ABOUT US We’re a startup with big ambitions: to make estate planning modern, visual, and intelligent. Vanilla https://www.justvanilla.com/ 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. Job Summary Vanilla is seeking a Staff 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 Staff 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 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. Qualifications - Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, a related field, or equivalent practical experience. - 8+ years relevant work experience. - Proficiency in modern programming languages such as Python or Javascript. - 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. - Production experience with scalability and best-practices of AI infrastructure. - Must have experience with AI…