Staff Software Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: NYC, NY

Employment Type: FullTime

Standard Template Labs is a stealth-mode, AI-native startup reimagining the future of IT Service and Configuration Management. Backed by leading investors, we're leveraging AI, graph-based architecture, and exceptional design to transform how enterprises manage and engage with their technology ecosystems.

About the Role:
We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer who thrives at the intersection of AI systems design, large-scale distributed infrastructure, and product innovation. You’ll lead technical initiatives that bring AI-native capabilities to life—building resilient, scalable systems that integrate LLMs, data-driven automation, and graph intelligence into enterprise workflows.

This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who codes deeply, mentors effectively, and loves shaping technical strategy in an AI-first environment.

Responsibilities:

• AI-Driven Systems Engineering

  • Design and develop AI-native architectures that embed LLMs and intelligent automation into ITSM and CMDB workflows.

  • Leverage LLMs, embeddings, and retrieval pipelines to power natural language interfaces, knowledge synthesis, and reasoning within our platform.

  • Collaborate with product, design, and data teams to infuse AI into every layer of the product experience—from backend systems to user-facing features.

  Technical Ownership

  • Own complex systems end-to-end: design, architecture, deployment, and production reliability.

  • Drive architectural decisions balancing near-term speed with long-term scalability and maintainability.

  • Help define our AI-first engineering stack and patterns for prompt orchestration, model integration, and continuous learning.

  Hands-On Engineering

  • Write clean, scalable, and testable code that pushes the boundaries of AI-enabled systems.

  • Design and optimize distributed, event-driven systems and APIs that handle data and inference at scale.

  • Conduct deep-dive code reviews and performance tuning across high-traffic, production environments.

  Leadership and Mentorship

  • Lead by example—uplifting code quality, fostering a culture of experimentation, and mentoring engineers in AI-augmented workflows.

  • Champion best practices in AI tooling adoption (e.g., Cursor, Windsurf, Claude) to enhance team productivity and creativity.

Qualifications:

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a record of delivering large-scale, high-impact systems.

• Deep expertise in distributed systems, cloud-native architecture, and API design.

• Hands-on experience with or strong interest in LLMs, vector databases, embeddings, or AI agent frameworks.

• Familiarity with prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and AI-powered developer tools.

• Experience mentoring engineers and guiding cross-functional teams toward technical excellence.

• Strong proficiency in one or more modern programming languages (e.g., Go, Python, Rust, or Java).

• Knowledge of Kubernetes, event-driven systems, and CI/CD best practices.

• A builder’s mindset: eager to explore, prototype, and ship fast.

What We Offer:

• Build foundational product features for an AI-first enterprise platform

• The opportunity to take ownership of critical systems that scale to millions of users

• A culture that values craftsmanship, autonomy, and technical excellence

• Competitive compensation, equity, and benefits package

• Work from our Flatiron District, Manhattan office, where you’ll be side-by-side with the founding team in a supportive, collaborative setting. Our team works on-site five days a week, growing and building together, and the location is easy to reach with plenty of public transportation options.

As an equal opportunity employer, we don’t tolerate discrimination or harassment of any kind. Whether that’s based on race, ethnicity, age, gender identity, citizenship, religion, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy, veteran status or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state or local laws. The reasonably estimated yearly salary for this role at is: $160,000—$230,000 USD.