AI Software Engineer, Product
At a glance
Mid-level AI Engineering role at Palona AI. Los Altos · full-time · no salary stated · we estimate $132,450–$205,151 across the United States.
Palona AI has not published a salary for this role. The figure below is our estimate, not theirs.
aimlroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Take AI product work from user problem discovery through launch, then measure results and refine the experience
- Build connected interfaces, APIs, data models, agent tools and integrations for restaurant products
- Combine models with context, memory, business rules and human escalation to shape agent workflows
- Work with restaurant and internal users to find problems, then turn their feedback into reusable capabilities
- Measure and improve AI behavior with evaluations, instrumentation and safeguards, while strengthening reliability and usability
What you bring
- At least three years of industrial experience in a relevant technical area
- A record of shipping production web or platform products, with solid software engineering fundamentals
- Depth in Python and backend work or TypeScript and React, plus readiness to contribute across the stack
- Hands-on work with LLMs, speech, computer vision or agents beyond a basic prototype
- Experience shaping APIs, data models, asynchronous processes and connections to external systems
Who this fits
This suits a product-minded engineer who can work across the stack, make practical tradeoffs and own quality through production use. You’ll work directly with users in an onsite role in Los Altos.
From the employer
We are looking for a product-focused AI Software Engineer to turn advances in AI into restaurant products that work reliably in the real world. You will build across customer-facing experiences, backend services, agent workflows, integrations, and evaluation systems. The job begins with a customer or product problem and ends when the solution is operating successfully in production—not when a model call works locally.
You may work on voice ordering, reservations, catering, restaurant operations, client configuration, analytics, or entirely new agent capabilities. You will collaborate directly with product, design, customer-facing teams, and restaurant operators; make fast product and technical tradeoffs; and own the quality of the resulting experience.
Our stack includes Python and FastAPI services, PostgreSQL, TypeScript, React and Next.js applications, real-time voice agents built with LiveKit, cloud infrastructure on AWS, and modern LLM, speech, and multimodal providers. Exact stack match is less important than full-stack range, product judgment, and a record of shipping.
What you’ll own
- Build and ship end-to-end AI product experiences from problem discovery and prototype through launch, measurement, and iteration.
- Develop customer-facing interfaces, backend APIs, data models, agent tools, and integrations as one coherent product.
- Design agent workflows that combine models, context, memory, business rules, deterministic services, and human escalation.
- Work directly with restaurant and internal users to understand failures, uncover unmet needs, and convert feedback into reusable product capabilities.
- Integrate with POS, reservation, messaging, telephony, and other external systems while handling imperfect data and real operational constraints.
- Build evaluations, instrumentation, guardrails, and feedback loops so probabilistic behavior can be measured and improved.
- Improve latency, reliability, accuracy, usability, and cost across the full experience—not only within one layer of the stack.
- Use AI-native development workflows to prototype and deliver quickly while retaining ownership of architecture, tests, security, and correctness.
- Participate in product and technical planning, make tradeoffs explicit, and drive decisions when the path is ambiguous.
- Raise the quality of nearby systems through code review, documentation, design discussion, and pragmatic refactoring.
Requirements
- 3+ years of industrial experience in relevant technical domain.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience shipping production web or platform products.
- Depth in either Python/backend engineering or TypeScript/React frontend engineering, plus the ability and desire to work effectively across the full stack.
- Experience building with LLMs, speech models, computer vision, or agent systems beyond a toy prototype.
- Product judgment: you can simplify scope, identify the highest-leverage user problem, and distinguish an impressive demo from a valuable product.
- Experience designing APIs, data models, asynchronous workflows, and integrations with external systems.
- A strong quality bar for testing, observability, security, reliability, and user experience.
- Comfort working directly with users and operating in a fast-changing startup environment.
- AI-native working habits paired with independent technical judgment.
Benefits
- Competitive Salary and Stock Option Plan.
- Medical, dental, vision, retirement, leave, and disability benefits as applicable.
- Family Leave
- Short Term & Long Term Disability
- Paid time off and company holidays.
- Learning and development support.