Staff AI Engineer

ImpactWe’re hiring a Staff AI Engineer to build product features powered by modern AI models. You’ll work across our Next.js/React frontend and Go backend services to ship AI-enabled capabilities that are reliable, measurable, and valuable to the business. You’ll be leading projects and mentoring engineers in the best practices of software development.
This role is ideal for a developer who can ship end-to-end features and is excited to leverage AI tools in their daily workflow (for research, prototyping, testing, and coding) while maintaining strong engineering quality. We do not expect you to be a machine learning researcher. We expect you to be a curious, pragmatic engineer who is excited to build customer facing capabilities.

Key Responsibilities

1. AI Product Development

• Build & Integrate: Design and implement full-stack features that utilize LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini) to solve user problems. You will build "Generative UI" elements where the AI renders interactive UI components.

• MCP Ecosystem & Tooling: Build and maintain Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to expose internal databases, APIs, and business logic as tools for LLMs.

• Streaming Interfaces: Using tools such as Google’s Agent Development Kit to build low-latency interfaces that stream text to the client, ensuring a responsive user experience even with slow models.

• Roadmap Ownership: Leading a team of developers to build new features on the web and mobile experience. Designing solutions and driving consensus between different teams.

2. Backend Systems & Orchestration

• Golang Development: Write robust, high-performance Go code to orchestrate AI services. You will use goroutines to manage concurrent agent execution and handle long-running third-party API calls efficiently.

• API Design: Design and implement RESTful and gRPC APIs that serve as the interface between our frontend and the AI models.

• Event-Driven Architecture: Collaborate on integrating Kafka and Redis to build asynchronous message processing pipelines. You will help decouple AI agents, allowing them to communicate via events rather than direct calls.

• Observability: Ensuring dashboards are set up for monitoring services to help debug issues during on-call incidents troubleshooting.

3. AI-Assisted Engineering (The "AI-Enhanced" Workflow)

• Tool Utilization: Actively use AI coding assistants (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, etc.) to accelerate boilerplate code generation, unit testing, and documentation. You will be expected to use these tools to multiply your output.

• Code Review & Debugging: Critically evaluate and debug AI-generated code. You are the gatekeeper of quality; you must understand every line of code committed, ensuring it meets security and performance standards. You will fix errors in code logic.

• Prompt Engineering & Evals: Iteratively refine system prompts to ensure consistent, safe, and high-quality model outputs. You will write automated "Evals" to test the AI's performance against regression.

Required Qualifications

• Experience: 8–10 years of professional software engineering experience.

Core Stack:

• GoLang: Practical experience building backend services or APIs in Go. Understanding of goroutines, channels, structs, and Go modules.

• JavaScript/TypeScript: Proficiency with React and the Next.js ecosystem (App Router, Components, Hooks, etc.).

AI/LLM Familiarity:

• Experience integrating LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini) into applications.

• Design and implement tools that allow AI models to interact securely with our backend services, ensuring the LLM has the right context to perform tasks.

• Familiarity with orchestration concepts (Google’s ADK, Vercel AI SDK, or custom orchestration).

• Database Literacy: Comfortable writing SQL queries and interacting with relational databases (Postgres preferred).

• Engineering Best Practices: Experience with Git version control, CI/CD basics, and writing unit tests.

"Nice-to-Have" Skills (The Differentiators)

• Mobile Development: Experience with React Native or Expo. Ability to deploy AI features to mobile devices and understand the constraints of mobile networks.

• Advanced Data Infrastructure: Familiarity with Apache Kafka for event streaming or Redis for caching.

• DevOps/Cloud: Exposure to Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS/GCP services.

Pay Range: $95,800 - $180,000

Please note that the salary range above is a guideline, and individual total compensation will vary based on factors such as qualifications, skill level, competencies, and work location.

Skills & Education

This list includes key skills used in this job but is not inclusive of all skills needed for the role. Please see any required education below.

AI Programming, Application Programming Interface (API), Backend Systems, Go Programming Language

Bachelor's Degree or equivalent experience | RequiredWork Arrangement

Shipt considers candidates located near a Shipt office or workspace in Birmingham, San Francisco, or Minneapolis to be hybrid, which means that they have the flexibility to work from home (with leader approval) or at a Shipt office in order to facilitate the ability to innovate, collaborate, and spark team connections. In-office expectations will vary by role and leader.  Certain roles may require in-office presence on a full-time basis. Please work with your recruiter to learn more about the classification of this role.

About Shipt

Shipt is a retail tech company that connects people to reliable, high-quality delivery with a personal touch. Shipt connects customers to the things they want from the stores they love, retail businesses to more satisfied customers, and workers to new earning opportunities.

At Shipt, we aim to put our team first to boost a sense of belonging, spark opportunities for growth, provide unique benefits and commit to giving back to our communities in ways that make life better, both personally and professionally. We understand that our service, our culture, and our connection to our communities are only made better by every single person who shows up to work here every day.  Learn More.

Shipt is an independently operated, wholly owned subsidiary of Target Corporation and available in more than 5,000 U.S. cities. Shipt was founded and is headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama. For more information, please visit Shipt’s company site at Shipt.com.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, ethnicity, religion or religious belief, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender status, sexual stereotypes, age, military or veteran status, disability, or any other characteristic protected by law.

Please inform your recruiting contact upon initial connection if you need a reasonable accommodation. If you need assistance filling out a job application, please complete this form.
For technical interviews, Shipt uses an online coding platform. In the event you may need a reasonable accommodation to use the online coding platform, please connect with your recruiter.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Employees (and eligible family members) are covered by medical, dental, vision and more.  Employees may enroll in our company’s 401k plan. Employees will also be eligible to receive discretionary vacation for exempt team members, paid holidays throughout the calendar year and paid sick leave.  Other compensation includes eligibility for an annual bonus and the potential for restricted stock units based on role.