Senior​/Software Engineer, AI Systems & Platform

The US energy landscape is changing rapidly; we’re sprinting ahead with it, facilitating business between clean energy developers, utilities, and customers (big and small) looking to accelerate the energy transition equitably and affordably. As the energy industry as a whole moves toward adoption of artificial intelligence, UtilityAPI is looking for a Senior or Staff Engineer with AI experience and an interest in mentorship to join our team as we continue to bring order to one of the most fragmented markets in the country—utility data.

We're a small, data-intensive engineering organization at an inflection point. We don't yet have an established AI architecture, AI-native product line, or AI-driven development cycles. We're looking for a senior/staff engineer to define the architecture, build the highest-value pieces themselves, establish the engineering practices around it, and bring the rest of the team along. You'll come in; assess our existing tech stack, data, and workflows end-to-end;

identify where AI can meaningfully solve problems; and drive the proposed initiatives experimentation to reliable production systems.

You are the leader who will figure out what an AI-native architecture and development workflow should look like for our team and product, then lead the execution for both. This is a high-autonomy role for someone who can operate as both a strong individual contributor and an informal technical leader — someone comfortable being the most AI-experienced person in the room, identifying high-leverage technical gaps and mobilizing engineers and cross-functional partners to address them without relying on formal authority.

That’s not to say you’ll be working alone; you’ll be part of a close-knit team, and supported by both your direct manager and the organization as a whole.

You are a responsible and thoughtful leader with a clear philosophy on AI, who will drive engineering best practices for AI data architecture, platform design, automation, testing, monitoring, and operational excellence within the constraints of the cautious, regulated sector of electric and gas utilities.

AI Integration & Strategy

• Own the technical direction for how we adopt AI across the product and engineering lifecycle. Assess our current stack, data, and workflows to define where AI can create the most leverage, and establish the technical architecture and infrastructure needed to support AI-native product capabilities. Develop and own a clear, pragmatic technical point of view on AI adoption across our product and engineering lifecycle and bring the rest of engineering along with you
• Identify, scope, and ship AI/ML capabilities that solve meaningful product and platform problems, taking them from experimentation through reliable production deployment
• Train, evaluate, and deploy models on our own large-scale structured data
• Build agentic AI systems on managed platforms like AWS Bedrock with experience in embedding pipelines, vector retrieval, RAG infrastructure, and semantic search
• Establish engineering patterns for AI systems, including evaluation, testing, observability, monitoring, and data-quality frameworks, while optimizing for reliability, latency, and cost
• Evaluate and adopt AI-assisted development tools and agentic workflows to increase engineering efficacy, and identify high-leverage opportunities for automation
• Mentor other engineers and champion AI literacy across the broader team, without gatekeeping the knowledge

Technical Debt & Platform Modernization

• Identify the highest-leverage gaps in our stack and practices, and drive the fixes
• Optimize platform scalability, reliability, performance, security, and cost across our cloud environment
• Improve our large-scale data…