Staff Software Engineer (AI)

About Juniper Square Private markets are one of the largest, most complex, and most underserved corners of global finance. Our mission at Juniper Square is to unlock their full potential. We’re the Operations Partner trusted by 2,300+ GPs, unifying technology, data, and fund administration services into a single platform that helps GPs move faster, make better decisions, and scale with precision. With $300B+ under administration and 700,000+ LPs on platform, we’ve built the scale to match our ambition. And with JunieAI, our purpose-built AI platform, we’re reimagining how private markets operate, embedding intelligence across every workflow. Founder-led since 2014, backed by $350M+ in funding, and now 1,000+ employees strong, we’re building a company designed to shape the future of private markets for decades to come. Our culture is built for people who want to do ambitious, meaningful work alongside exceptionally talented teammates. We think like owners, move with urgency, and take pride in solving hard problems that truly matter to our customers and the future of private markets. We believe the best ideas come from open debate, deep collaboration, and diverse perspectives, which is why we believe transparency is the default and feedback makes us stronger. If you’re energized by high standards, rapid growth, and the opportunity to help define a category at a pivotal moment, come join us! Juniper Square offers employees a variety of ways to work, ranging from a fully remote experience to working full-time in one of our physical offices. We invest heavily in digital-first operations, allowing our teams to collaborate effectively across 27 U.S. states, 2 Canadian Provinces, India, Luxembourg, and England. We also have physical offices in San Francisco, New York City, Mumbai and Bangalore for employees who prefer to work in an office some or all of the time. About your role We're hiring Staff Software Engineers to join our AI-native engineering team. At the Staff level, you are a technical leader - setting technical direction, driving architectural decisions, and raising engineering quality across your team. You will own the strategy and hands-on delivery of AI systems that power core product experiences for institutional financial clients, spanning AI platform infrastructure, agentic workflows, and LLM-powered features. This is a player-coach role for engineers who lead through code and architecture, not just direction. What you'll do Own Technical Direction and Architecture • Set the technical direction for AI systems - including shared AI SDKs, guardrails, evaluation frameworks, feedback systems, and agentic workflow infrastructure • Own architecture and technical strategy for complex backend and AI platform systems, from design through production • Lead technical design for ambiguous, cross-functional initiatives - evaluating tradeoffs, aligning stakeholders, and driving implementation • Evaluate and select technologies with a bias toward what ships well and scales sustainably Build and Operate AI Systems • Write production code as a hands-on individual contributor - this is not a role that delegates implementation to others • Design and operate LLM-powered systems: RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, evaluation infrastructure, guardrails, and model observability • Own end-to-end reliability of AI systems from design through structured output delivery • Define quality benchmarks, evaluation frameworks, and feedback loops to continuously improve AI output accuracy and system reliability Champion AI-Native Development • Champion and embed AI-native development practices and tools (e.g., Cursor, Augment) to achieve significant productivity gains across the team • Foster a culture of rapid iteration, high velocity, and quality - including guiding the effective use of AI code generation • Bring strong, informed opinions about how to get the most from AI-assisted development while maintaining reliability and correctness Lead and Grow the Team • Mentor engineers, raise the quality of technical decision-making, and help the team execute with consistency • Establish coding standards, review practices, and architectural documentation that scale as the team grows • Help define what "good" looks like for a team building at speed without sacrificing quality • Partner with recruiting to build and grow the team Collaborate Cross-Functionally • Work closely with engineering managers, product, design, and QA to translate requirements into executable technical plans • Participate actively in design reviews and roadmap discussions with grounded, implementation-level perspective • Handle most cross-team conflicts and technical decisions autonomously Qualifications Required • 7+ years of backend and/or ML engineering experience with a trajectory of increasing technical leadership, architectural responsibility, and mentorship • A portfolio of shipped production systems - we will ask you to walk through specific technical decisions you personally made and code you personally wrote; this is not a role for someone whose primary contribution has been directing others • Deep expertise in Python, with strong proficiency in building production-grade backend services; experience with other server-side languages (Node/TS, Java) a plus • Production experience building and operating AI/LLM-powered systems — such as AI SDKs, RAG pipelines, evaluation frameworks, agentic workflows, or model observability — in real systems, not just experimentation • Experience leading technical design for complex systems, including making architecture decisions, evaluating tradeoffs, and guiding implementation across multiple engineers or teams • Experience with relational/NoSQL databases, including schema design, performance tuning, and data modeling • Experience building and operating cloud-native systems using AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, and infrastructure as code • Strong understanding of CI/CD, observability, reliability, and operational excellence in production environments • Ability to work through ambiguity, break down complex problems, and drive alignment across engineering, product, and design • Demonstrated ability to raise engineering quality through technical standards, design reviews, mentoring, and reusable platform patterns • Hands-on experience with AI-native development tools (e.g., Cursor, Augment); demonstrated ability to embed AI-driven practices to accelerate team velocity and code quality • Ability to critically evaluate AI-generated code and outputs, including identifying failure modes, regressions, and edge cases Preferred • Experience with document processing pipelines, structured extraction, or vector stores • Familiarity with MLOps tooling, experiment tracking, or model deployment pipelines • Background in financial document processing or fintech data pipelines • Prior experience in a technical lead or TLM capacity on a new or early-stage product team Compensation Compensation for this position includes a base salary, equity, and a variety of benefits. The U.S. base salary range for this role is $210,000 – $260,000 USD. Actual base salaries will be based on candidate-specific factors, including experience, skillset, and location, and local minimum pay requirements as applicable. Benefits include: • Health, dental, and vision care for you and your family • Life insurance • Mental wellness coverage • Fertility and growing family support • Flex Time Off in addition to company-paid holidays • Paid family leave, medical leave, and bereavement leave policies • Retirement saving plans • Allowance to customize your work and technology setup at home • Annual professional development stipend Your recruiter can provide additional details about compensation and benefits.