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Ontra is the leader in AI-powered solutions for the private markets, trusted by over 1,000 global GPs, investment banks, law firms, and advisors—including nine of the top ten PEI-ranked firms. The company automates critical private market workflows by transforming unstructured data from contracts into actionable intelligence.
You will be the first engineer dedicated to AI Operations, reporting to the Director of AI Operations. This is a hands-on Staff role with broad company impact, serving as the technical lead for company-wide internal AI work.
Key Responsibilities:
- Set technical direction for internal AI initiatives by evaluating options and recommending architecture, integrations, and delivery approaches across the company.
- Design and deliver dependable, reusable systems—services, agents, integrations, and automations—that solve agreed priorities, leveraging existing platforms where appropriate and creating reusable patterns for other teams.
- Partner across business and technical teams (GTM, Finance, Build, Infrastructure, Data, Security, IT) to assess problems, align on approach, and move decisions forward.
- Lead through technical partnership by shaping cross-system architecture decisions, guiding design and code review, and helping other engineers improve without relying on management authority.
- Support trusted company context by assessing and implementing interfaces and integrations that allow approved AI systems to use reliable company data while preserving permissions and ownership.
- Own production reliability by ensuring every shipped service has qualified review, a named owner and backup, documentation, monitoring, recovery steps, and a maintenance plan.
- Deliver against milestones by owning technical assessment, design, implementation, and operation of internal AI priorities, meeting quality, reliability, recovery, usage, and cost targets with appropriate telemetry and cost attribution.
Ontra is remote-first with office hubs in NYC, Santa Barbara, and London. The company values ownership, collaboration, and curiosity about AI. Occasional travel is required, typically twice yearly for team offsites.
Requirements:
- 8+ years of software engineering experience with demonstrated Staff-level scope and impact across teams or systems.
- Hands-on experience delivering production AI systems is required.
- Track record of setting technical direction across multiple teams, systems, or business areas, with clear evidence of scope over tenure or title.
- Experience shipping and operating at least one production AI-enabled system, including evaluation, reliability, data, cost, and post-launch ownership.
- Experience designing internal services, agents, APIs, integrations, automations, or data flows across system boundaries, with working production knowledge of identity, authorization, testing, deployment, monitoring, incidents, and recovery.
- Ability to assess unfamiliar systems and provide strong design and code review across technical boundaries.
- Strong hands-on production software engineering skills; recent Python experience is preferred. SQL and data validation experience is a plus.
