Software Engineer, CKD

At Nerd Wallet, we’re on a mission to bring clarity to all of life’s financial decisions and every great mission needs a team of exceptional Nerds. We’ve built an inclusive, flexible, and candid culture where you’re empowered to grow, take smart risks, and be unapologetically yourself (cape optional). Whether remote or in-office, we support how you thrive best. We invest in your well-being, development, and ability to make an impact because when one Nerd levels up, we all do.

Nerd Wallet is looking for a hands‑on Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical direction for bringing Nerd Wallet's financial guidance into the AI assistants consumers already use. More and more people start their financial decisions with a conversation instead of a search. We want Nerd Wallet's trusted guidance to be there when they do.

You’ll architect and build Nerd Wallet's apps and integrations on leading third‑party AI platforms. That means production LLM-backed systems that run inside environments we don’t control: they have to stay accurate, grounded in trusted content, and compliant in a highly regulated domain, while adapting to fast‑moving platform capabilities, protocols, and policies. You’ll be the senior technical voice across the platform integration teams and partner closely with the team that owns the shared services these integrations run on.

This is a hands‑on role. The ideal candidate writes a lot of code, sets the architectural bar, and makes the engineers around them better.

You're a staff engineer who is energized by building on brand-new platforms where the playbook doesn't exist yet. You'll turn ambiguous product bets into clear technical plans, then build the critical parts yourself. You'll define how Nerd Wallet shows up across multiple AI platforms, balancing what should be shared against what needs to be platform‑specific so each team can move fast and independently.

You're a trusted technical advisor to Engineering Managers and Product Managers, you raise the quality bar through design and code review, and you mentor engineers on building reliable systems on top of non‑deterministic models. You stay close to the rapidly changing AI ecosystem and help Nerd Wallet decide where to invest.

This role reports to the Director, Engineering.

• Lead the technical direction for AI platform integrations. Own the architecture for how Nerd Wallet's guidance is packaged, exposed, and rendered inside third‑party AI assistants, from tool and protocol design to in‑conversation UI.
• Build a lot of it yourself. Write production code for new integrations, prototype new platform capabilities as they launch, and unblock teams on the hardest technical problems.
• Design for reuse across platforms. Define the abstractions, contracts, and patterns that let multiple platform teams share a common foundation while still using each platform's unique features.
• Adapt as platforms change. Track evolving platform protocols, SDKs, review processes, and policies. Turn those changes into roadmap and architecture decisions before they become blockers.
• Make quality measurable. Help define eval and testing strategy for platform integrations, including automated evals, regression suites, and end‑to‑end tests across environments you don't fully control.
• Build safely for a regulated domain. Partner with Security, Legal, and Compliance so integrations handle authentication, consent, and sensitive consumer data correctly and follow financial compliance requirements.
• Own reliability and performance. Set standards for monitoring, latency, cost, and incident response on platform‑facing services, and help resolve production issues when they happen.
• Raise the engineering bar. Lead design reviews, set coding and…