Job Summary
This role is responsible for defining and building the shared AI platform that MeridianLink’s product and engineering teams use to deliver AI-powered features consistently and at scale. You will work across product domains to identify common requirements, design platform services that abstract the hard parts of AI integration, and establish the patterns and standards teams follow when building on top of AI. The right person for this role thinks in platforms, not features, and has strong opinions about what it means to make AI capabilities reliable, observable, and safe in a regulated industry.
About the Opportunity
Staff engineers at MeridianLink operate across multiple teams or an entire product line. They set technical direction, make architecture and technology decisions that others build against, and raise the engineering floor across the teams they touch. Staff engineers are active, daily users of AI-assisted development tools — and go further by building the workflows, tooling, and patterns that make those tools more effective for the teams around them.
Technical Leadership & Architecture
Cross-Team Execution
AI Platform Design & Architecture
Designs shared AI platform services — including model integration layers, prompt management, retrieval-augmented generation infrastructure, embedding pipelines, and vector store management — that product teams can build on without re-solving the same problems
Defines the reference architecture for how AI capabilities are consumed across products, including interface contracts, versioning, and deprecation strategies
Evaluates and selects AI infrastructure components (cloud-managed model services, orchestration frameworks, vector databases) based on reliability, cost, latency, and operational complexity at scale
AI Reliability, Safety & Observability
Designs evaluation and monitoring pipelines that give teams visibility into AI output quality, latency, cost, and degradation over time
Platform Adoption & Developer Experience
Key Responsibilities
AI Platform Discovery & Design
Platform Build & Standards
Lead development of core AI platform services: model serving and routing, retrieval infrastructure, prompt management, output evaluation, and usage observability
Collaboration & Growing Others
Own the design and maintenance of technical knowledge infrastructure — RFCs, ADRs, runbooks, onboarding paths — so teams can operate without needing to escalate
Required Experience
Preferred Qualifications
What Success Looks Like
In the first 90 days, this person has completed a discovery pass across our AI products teams, documented the current and planned AI use cases, and produced an initial platform architecture proposal for review by engineering leadership. Within six months, at least one core AI platform service is in production and being consumed by a product team, and the patterns for how teams integrate with AI capabilities are documented and enforced through the platform, not tribal knowledge.
Compensation Range: $126K - $214.9K
