Senior Software Engineer

Stanford University, through Stanford GSB Digital Solutions, is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to support a portfolio of web applications and cloud platforms. The role spans the full delivery lifecycle, from early feasibility work to production operations, with an emphasis on building secure, scalable, AI-enabled applications.

This onsite position in Stanford, CA involves turning prototypes into dependable software, incorporating security and privacy throughout development, and partnering across teams and business stakeholders to deliver measurable value.

What you will do

• Design and develop complex applications, web solutions, and integrations aligned to business needs.
• Assess new ideas for feasibility, value, data availability, security, cost, and operational impact; build prototypes, validate assumptions with users, and recommend next steps.
• Develop AI-enabled applications and workflows using appropriate models, APIs, retrieval techniques, and tools; use AI development tools effectively while staying accountable for code quality and correctness.
• Bring successful prototypes into secure, scalable production with automated testing, deployment pipelines, monitoring, and rollback capabilities.
• Embed security and privacy across development, including access controls, protection of sensitive data, and safeguards against AI-specific risks.
• Own the application life cycle, including deployment, production support, documentation, maintenance, dependency and model upgrades, migration, and retirement.
• Oversee testing, debugging, and change control; evaluate application and AI performance, reliability, output quality, latency, and cost, and address failures and regressions.
• Lead projects and troubleshoot complex issues; mentor engineers, help establish standards, and contribute to long-term technical planning.
• Collaborate with business users, analysts, QA, and distributed remote technical teams across time zones to improve processes and deliver value, following GSB principles such as open, honest, and timely communication, personal ownership, and innovation.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

Minimum qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related discipline.
• Experience: 8 years of increasing responsibility in software development, or a combination of education and relevant experience.
• AI experience: At least 2 years of sustained, hands-on experience building, evaluating, and improving AI-enabled applications or substantive AI workflows (chatbots, AI plugins, or code assistants alone do not satisfy this requirement).
• Demonstrable AI experience from professional work, applied research, open-source contributions, or sustained independent projects, including the ability to explain implementations, experiments, technical decisions, failures, and improvements.
• Proven ability to independently assess ambiguous ideas, rapidly build working prototypes, and deliver and support production applications, including AI-enabled solutions.
• Practical experience with model APIs or SDKs, prompt and context design, and patterns such as retrieval-augmented generation, structured outputs, or tool calling, including evaluation across quality, latency, cost, and privacy.
• Experience using AI coding assistants or agentic development tools for substantive development, debugging, testing, or refactoring, with the ability to understand, validate, and maintain the resulting code.
• Strong coding skills in at least one language such as Java, Python, PHP, or C#, plus experience with frontend and backend web development, including JavaScript frameworks such as React or NextJS.
• Understanding of software architecture, testing, deployment, and life cycle management, including secure coding, scalability, accessibility, complex workflows, and system integration.
• Skills in one or more areas such as API development, service-oriented architecture, cloud computing, MVC, or mobile application development.
• Demonstrated technical leadership and mentoring, with experience working in distributed agile/scrum teams and explaining technical tradeoffs to technical and nontechnical audiences.

Technologies

• AI, Java, Python, PHP, C#, JavaScript, React, NextJS
• Model APIs, SDKs
• Retrieval-augmented generation, structured outputs, tool calling
• Cloud computing, API development, service-oriented architecture, MVC, mobile application development