First American Title Insurance Co is hiring a Staff Software Engineer (AI-Native Platform) to help shape technical strategy and platform direction across multiple engineering teams. In this remote role from Santa Ana, CA, you will lead architecture and engineering standards that improve scalability, reliability, and developer productivity, while driving AI-powered development practices and production-grade AI systems.
What you’ll do
- Lead cross-team technical initiatives by defining architectural direction, aligning organizations around shared approaches, and guiding long-term investments that improve organizational scalability, reliability, and developer productivity.
- Navigate ambiguity and resolve competing priorities by building consensus across engineering, product, and business stakeholders.
- Design and evolve AI development practices and support the creation of AI-powered products.
- Own architecture for large-scale distributed systems spanning multiple services, domains, and business capabilities.
- Drive consistency across key technical areas, including APIs, event-driven systems, cloud infrastructure, reliability, security, observability, and operational excellence.
- Simplify complex systems through abstractions and reusable patterns, and establish engineering standards that raise software quality across the organization.
- Lead architectural reviews and influence design tradeoffs between speed, simplicity, scalability, reliability, and cost.
- Promote modern practices such as AI-assisted software development, automated testing, observability, continuous delivery, and platform engineering.
- Multiply impact through coaching, architectural guidance, and design mentorship for senior engineers and technical leads.
- Improve organizational maturity by leading initiatives focused on reliability, resiliency, security, and operational excellence.
- Define engineering patterns for observability, production diagnostics, AI evaluation, latency budgets, cost optimization, incident response, resiliency, and governance.
- Partner closely with engineering leadership, product management, solution architecture, security, platform engineering, infrastructure, and AI practitioners to translate business strategy into scalable solutions through strong communication and technical expertise.
What you bring
- 8+ years of experience designing and building production software systems, including significant experience leading large-scale technical initiatives.
- Proven experience driving architecture across multiple teams, services, or business domains.
- Deep experience building cloud-native distributed systems using modern engineering practices.
- Experience designing and operating production AI systems, including LLM-powered applications and agentic workflows.
- Strong background creating reusable platforms, frameworks, libraries, or shared infrastructure adopted across multiple teams.
- Expertise designing APIs, event-driven architectures, and highly available distributed systems.
- Experience establishing engineering standards, architectural patterns, and operational best practices across organizations.
- Demonstrated ability to lead technical direction through influence rather than direct management.
- Deep understanding of AI operational concerns: evaluation strategies, model selection, latency optimization, cost management, observability, governance, and safety.
- Experience designing AI development workflows that improve productivity using responsible AI-assisted development tools such as Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or similar.
- Strong communication skills to explain complex concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Proven ability to mentor senior engineers and elevate engineering organizations through coaching and technical leadership.
- Strong systems thinking with an outcome-oriented mindset focused on creating durable organizational leverage.
Tools and technologies you may work with
Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, C# (.NET), Python, TypeScript, Go, Java, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, CDK, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, vision
- 401k
- PTO/paid sick leave
- Employee stock purchase plan
What we offer: First American is an equal opportunity employer. Based on eligibility, the company offers a comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, vision, 401k, PTO/paid sick leave, and an employee stock purchase plan.
