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NerdWallet is seeking a hands-on Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical direction for integrating NerdWallet's financial guidance into AI assistants that consumers already use. The role focuses on architecting and building production LLM-backed systems that run inside third-party AI platforms while maintaining accuracy, compliance with financial regulations, and adaptability to rapidly evolving platform capabilities.
You will be the senior technical voice across platform integration teams, working closely with teams that own shared services. This is a highly technical, hands-on position where you will write significant production code, set architectural standards, and elevate the engineering quality across the organization.
Key responsibilities include:
- Leading technical direction for AI platform integrations, owning architecture for how NerdWallet's guidance is packaged and exposed inside third-party AI assistants
- Writing production code for new integrations and prototyping new platform capabilities as they launch
- Designing reusable abstractions and patterns that allow multiple platform teams to share a common foundation while leveraging platform-specific features
- Tracking evolving platform protocols, SDKs, and policies, translating changes into roadmap and architecture decisions
- Defining evaluation and testing strategies for platform integrations, including automated evals and end-to-end tests
- Partnering with Security, Legal, and Compliance to ensure integrations handle authentication, consent, and sensitive data correctly within financial compliance requirements
- Establishing standards for monitoring, latency, cost, and incident response on platform-facing services
- Leading design reviews, setting coding and architecture standards, and conducting code reviews
- Mentoring engineers across FTE and contractor teams on system design and LLM-backed development
- Collaborating with Engineering Managers and Product on roadmap priorities and technical recommendations
- Using data to identify integration performance gaps and guide development priorities
Reports to Director, Engineering.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 8+ years in software engineering with at least 3+ years at Staff level and deep hands-on experience building and operating production backend systems
- Track record of technical leadership: architecting complex systems end-to-end, leading teams through hard technical problems, establishing best practices, and mentoring engineers
- Hands-on production experience with LLMs: tool use/function calling, MCP or similar protocols, prompt and context design, retrieval (RAG), evals, and handling non-deterministic output
- Advanced knowledge of modern TypeScript stack (Node.js, React, GraphQL, Postgres, Redis) with judgment to evaluate unfamiliar codebases, SDKs, and vendor tools
- Experience designing APIs and shared services for other teams, including versioning, backward compatibility, and balancing competing needs
- Experience building on third-party platforms or ecosystems (app stores, plugin/extension ecosystems, partner APIs) within external constraints and review processes
- Strong understanding of authentication and authorization patterns (OAuth) and security best practices for sensitive data
- Comfort with early-stage, zero-to-one work where product, platform, and process are being defined
- Strong communication skills explaining AI system behavior, tradeoffs, and risk to engineers, product partners, and leadership
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- Experience building apps, connectors, or agents for major AI assistant platforms
- Experience shipping AI features in regulated industries (fintech, lending, insurance, healthcare) including privacy, consent, and compliance review
- Experience with AWS, modern CI/CD, containerization, and observability for LLM systems (tracing, cost and latency monitoring)
- Experience mentoring engineers across blended FTE and vendor/contractor teams
- Comfort in fast-paced environments where priorities shift as platforms and user behavior evolve
