Senior Software Engineer (Applied AI)

• Homeward is looking for an Applied AI Engineer to help us build AI into our products and the way our team works
• This role has two sides: building the tooling and practices that make it easier for every team here to build with AI, and taking on hard, AI-solved problems
• Our Product & Technology team works closely with internal partners as well as our external customers, agents, and their teams and brokerages, so the AI products you build will reach both
• This role reports to the SVP, Technology
• Have an immediate impact on how Homeward builds with AI
• Design, build, and maintain AI-powered features in our products, including LLM API integrations, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, and AI-driven automation across our customer, agent, and operations tools
• Understand and communicate requirements and
• Build and improve shared tooling and reusable components that make it easier for teams across tech to access, integrate, and operate LLMs in production
• Contribute to the tooling we use to keep AI features reliable - observability, monitoring, evaluation, and prompt and context management - so we can measure and debug them with confidence
• Take on hard, ambiguous problems that can be solved leveraging LLMs and ML to solve real business problems, then help others learn how to solve similar problems
• Prototype solutions quickly, then work with peers and senior engineers to harden them into something we can ship and maintain
• Help shape the patterns and practices for building with AI at Homeward, and make the right way the easy way for the rest of the team
• Evaluate new models, tools, and approaches, recommend what’s worth adopting, and help others adopt it
• Use AI coding assistants (Claude, Copilot) as a natural part of your daily workflow, and help the team get more out of them
• Write automated unit and integration tests to support our CI pipelines, and participate in code reviews
• Work closely with Product, Engineering, and Data to make sure what we build is useful, well-documented, and easy to adopt

Benefits

• Every full-time member of our team gets an equity grant. We all own a piece of our success
• In addition to 12 company holidays and two floating holidays, our team members enjoy 20 days of vacation and can rest easy with five sick days
• Homeward employees have medical, dental, vision, and counseling coverage
• New human in the house? You’ll get up to 14 weeks of paid leave as a primary caregiver and up to seven weeks as a secondary caregiver
• We can’t see the future, but we can help you be smart about it with life and accident insurance as well as a 401K match- The ideal candidate is a self-starter who takes pride in ownership of their work, can diagnose issues and develop solutions quickly, and communicates clearly with multiple stakeholders
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, and the ability to make complex things clear to others
• Hands-on experience building or operating AI/ML systems in production, and a real interest in the practical side of it - reliability, performance, cost, and safety
• General curiosity and comfort navigating a fast-changing AI landscape
• Working knowledge of version control and CI/CD tools
• A build, test, learn mindset with a bias toward action and a focus on business outcomes
• Scrappy and flexible - from updating an email template to building a complex web app, you do what the team needs and you’re eager to learn along the way
• Production experience with LLM APIs, including prompt design and context management
• 4-6 years of professional back-end development experience, ideally in a fast-moving environment
• Solid grounding in web development best practices - REST APIs, asynchronous task management, and sound data management
• Good judgment on the trade-offs between reliability, latency, cost, quality, and maintainability, and the willingness to make the call
• Strong experience with Python and a back-end framework such as Django, Flask, or FastAPI
• Incredibly strong ownership of delivering the right solutions at a high quality