Staff Software Engineer - AI Applications
Staff engineer on Moloco's AI Applications team building LLM-powered products and internal tools end-to-end — agentic systems, RAG, evals and monitoring — to redesign company workflows (customer lifecycle, recruiting, planning) and improve customer experience. Greenfield, full-stack GenAI work.
- Compensation
- $198K–$275K / yr
- Location
- Menlo Park, California, United States; Seattle, Washington, United States
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Staff
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 8+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience owning complex, cross-functional systems end-to-end
- Deep hands-on experience architecting LLM-powered applications at production scale (agentic systems, RAG, tool-using assistants) with latency/cost/reliability/quality tradeoffs
- Experience with agent frameworks/orchestration (e.g., LangGraph, custom agent loops) and multi-step reasoning systems
- Proven experience designing evaluation and monitoring systems for AI products that teams adopt
- Strong systems design skills: defining architecture and technical standards multiple teams can build on
- Fluency across the stack (frontend, backend, infra)
- Experience influencing technical direction beyond your own team (standards, mentoring, technical strategy)
- History of independently identifying high-leverage problems and building conviction with stakeholders and leadership
Nice to have
- Experience building internal AI platform capabilities: key management, spend caps, permissioning, hosting for AI-developed apps
- Track record leading a SaaS rationalization or build-vs-buy effort involving AI-first custom replacements
- Experience redesigning a critical business workflow around AI (e.g., recruiting, customer lifecycle, planning/forecasting)
- Prior platform or infra-adjacent role requiring strong product instincts
- Public or internal thought leadership on agent architectures, evals, or applied LLM engineering
- Comfortable operating with minimal process and setting technical direction in a greenfield environment
Full description
About Moloco:
Moloco is an AI-native performance advertising company, bringing the power of AI advertising to the open internet. Founded in 2013 by machine learning engineers who had built AI advertising systems inside the world's largest technology companies, Moloco began from a shared mission: to build that same engine for the open internet.
Today, Moloco is one company with two businesses, built on the same compound AI system. Moloco Ads is our AI-native performance advertising platform, helping mobile app marketers acquire, retain, and re-engage high-value users across the open internet. Moloco Commerce Media is our AI-native retail media platform, enabling retailers and marketplaces to turn their platforms into thriving ad businesses. Both are powered by CARA (Compound Ad Recommendation Architecture), the AI system behind every Moloco product.
At Moloco, we bring together those who've already solved hard problems and those with the drive to. Here, we work on some of the complex problems in AI advertising, at a scale and level of sophistication very few companies can offer. Come build what's next.
The Impact You'll Be Contributing to Moloco:
Our mission is to change how Moloco operates as a company. AI makes it possible to rebuild how work gets done — not to shave minutes off tasks, but to redesign entire workflows so every Molocan operates with the leverage of a much larger team.
Two principles will guide the team.
- Outcomes first — AI will be a tool, not the goal; teams will pick the best solution for Moloco with the same engineering rigor as any other eng org.
- Shared foundations, not central control — common infrastructure, guardrails, security, and standards that every team will build on autonomously.
Three core pillars:
- Enable safely. Safe rails for every Molocan — hosting for AI-developed apps, key management, spend caps, permissions and provisioning. With proper guardrails, neither recent incident would have shipped unreviewed or run unbounded.
- Rebuild workflows GenAI-first. Redesign the company’s most critical workflows from the ground up around AI — the customer lifecycle from onboarding to campaign management and upsell, the recruiting pipeline from sourcing to offer, quarterly planning and forecasting.
- Rationalize the stack. Evaluate, consolidate, and selectively replace SaaS where AI-first custom is better — e.g., the BI consolidation and open-weights proposals below.
The Opportunity:
This role is part of the AI Applications team, an extension of Moloco's generative AI initiative. This team sits higher in the AI stack, closer to the user, and focuses on the delivery layer rather than infrastructure. The primary mission is to build AI-powered products and tools that: