Senior Software Engineer (AI Infrastructure)

$160K - $180K Irvine, CA, US Senior AI Software Engineer

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Skills & Technologies

AwsAzureGcpPythonTypescriptVector Search

About This Role

AI job market dashboard showing open roles by category

Location: Irvine, CA | On-site Employment Type: Full-time

About the role

You'll build the data systems and services behind our AI platform. You'll turn complex financial and case documents into structured, trustworthy data for our AI, analytics, and operational systems, and help build the real-time services the organization depends on. You'll join a team that already has a working platform with design docs, tests, and CI, and help shape where it goes next. The work is hands-on, from design through deployment.

What you'll do

Data

  • Build batch and real-time pipelines that bring in data from documents, APIs, CRM systems, and internal services.
  • Build document-processing systems on OCR and AI models that stay accurate, reliable, and affordable as volume grows.
  • Design data models across relational databases, document stores, and data lake storage, and change them safely as the product evolves.
  • Give AI/ML teams clean, structured, accessible datasets, including training data.
  • Build data quality checks and monitoring so bad data is caught before anyone relies on it.

Platform and services

  • Build and run APIs and background services, and own how they behave when the systems they depend on are slow, failing, or rate-limited.
  • Maintain integrations with our CRM and other third-party systems, and fix them when they break.
  • Help build real-time sales tools where speed and correctness both matter, such as lead routing and live caller lookup.
  • Contribute to secure, controlled data exports to external partners.
  • Maintain older services and migrate them to our primary cloud where it makes sense.
  • Support the internal web tools our case and sales staff use.

Engineering practice

  • Write design docs for your own work and contribute to architecture decisions.
  • Work in our infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD setup, changing it as your work requires.
  • Protect sensitive personal and financial data in code, logs, configuration, and third-party integrations.
  • Mentor junior engineers and help improve our standards for code quality, CI, and releases, including guardrails for AI coding agents.

What You Bring

We care more about fundamentals than any particular stack. In each area below, we're looking for someone who can explain why things work the way they do, not just name the tools.

  • Experience. 5+ years building production backend or data systems, or equivalent depth: you've owned production systems end to end, made the design decisions, and handled the incidents. A degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
  • Software engineering. You treat engineering as more than programming. You frame the problem, weigh the options, write down the trade-offs, and choose the simplest design that works. You ship code that's tested, observable, and easy to change. You measure before you optimize, and you own what you build after it ships.
  • Languages. Deep experience in at least one backend language. We work mostly in Python.
  • Databases. Strong SQL and data modeling across relational and document databases, and a clear sense of when to use which. You understand indexes and query plans, transactions and isolation, schema changes that don't break running systems, and keeping data consistent when it lives in more than one store.
  • Data pipelines. You've built pipelines over structured and unstructured data (JSON, PDFs) that are safe to rerun and backfill, and you understand how to model data for analytics.
  • AI systems. You've run LLM or OCR workloads in production and know how they behave: output that varies from run to run, structured output that needs validating, quality you have to measure, and latency and cost that grow with volume.
  • Model deployments. You understand how models are deployed and served: capacity and quotas, pinning versions and evaluating new ones before switching, rolling back, and falling back when a model or region is unavailable.
  • Rate limits. You understand rate limiting from both sides: how a client should handle a 429, how a service protects itself with quotas and backpressure, and the various 429 errors that can occur for LLM deployments.
  • Distributed systems and contracts. You treat APIs, events, and schemas as contracts between services and teams: versioned, backward compatible, and clearly owned. You design for partial failure: timeouts, idempotent retries, delivery guarantees, and what to do with work that will never succeed.
  • Cloud and infrastructure. Production experience on a major cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP), running services on serverless and container platforms. You understand what sits underneath (networking, DNS, private connectivity, identity, and permissions) and can read, change, and deploy it as code through CI/CD.
  • Authentication. You understand OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect, SSO and MFA, and how tokens are issued, validated, and expired. You follow current practice, such as short-lived credentials and service-to-service auth without shared secrets.
  • Authorization (RBAC). You design access around roles and least privilege, scope permissions to the resources they cover, and enforce them on the server, not just in the UI.
  • User management. You understand the lifecycle of user and service accounts: provisioning, role changes, offboarding, and regular access reviews.
  • Data protection. You keep secrets out of code and personal data out of logs, and you treat customer and company information as strictly confidential.
  • Communication. Clear design docs, PR descriptions, and incident write-ups.

Nice to have

  • Experience with our stack: Python, Azure, React and TypeScript, and Google Cloud (where some older services still run).
  • Orchestration and data platform tools such as Dagster, Airflow, or Databricks.
  • Streaming systems such as Kafka.
  • Retrieval and vector search.
  • Distributed rate limiting or API gateway design.
  • CRM or third-party integrations with fragile authentication.
  • Regulated or PII-heavy domains such as tax or finance.

Using AI coding agents in production work. *

What We Offer

  • Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance
  • Supplemental benefits like: Life Insurance, flexible spending, and many more...
  • 401k with a 4% employer match

Compensation: $160,000 - $180,000 per year, depending on experience

We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, pregnancy, age, national origin, disability status, genetic information, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value diversity and encourage all qualified individuals to apply.

Salary Context

This $160K-$180K range is below the median for AI Software Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $193K across 172 roles with salary data).

Role Details

Title Senior Software Engineer (AI Infrastructure)
Location Irvine, CA, US
Category AI Software Engineer
Experience Senior
Salary $160K - $180K
Remote No

About This Role

AI Software Engineers build the applications and systems that AI models run inside. They own the API layers, data pipelines, frontend integrations, and infrastructure that turn a model into a product users interact with. Every AI company needs engineers who can build the software around the AI.

The challenge is building reliable systems around inherently unreliable components. Models are probabilistic. They'll give different answers to the same question. They hallucinate. They're slow. They're expensive. Your job is to build an application layer that handles all of this gracefully while delivering a product that users trust and enjoy.

Across the 9,653 AI roles we're tracking, AI Software Engineer positions make up 5% of the market. At Tax Relief Advocates, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.

AI Software Engineer roles are among the most numerous in the AI job market. Every company deploying AI needs software engineers who understand AI integration patterns. The demand is broad, spanning startups to enterprises, across every industry adopting AI capabilities.

What the Work Looks Like

A typical week includes: building API endpoints that serve model inference with caching and fallback logic, designing the data pipeline that feeds context to a RAG system, implementing streaming responses in the frontend, debugging a race condition in the async inference pipeline, and optimizing database queries for the vector search layer. It's full-stack engineering with AI at the center.

AI Software Engineer roles are among the most numerous in the AI job market. Every company deploying AI needs software engineers who understand AI integration patterns. The demand is broad, spanning startups to enterprises, across every industry adopting AI capabilities.

Skills Required

Aws (9% of roles) Azure (8% of roles) Gcp (5% of roles) Python (17% of roles) Typescript (3% of roles) Vector Search (1% of roles)

Full-stack engineering skills with AI integration experience. Python and TypeScript are the most common requirements. You'll need to understand API design, database architecture, and how to build reliable systems around probabilistic outputs. Experience with streaming, async processing, and caching patterns is increasingly important as real-time AI applications proliferate.

Knowledge of vector databases, embedding APIs, and LLM integration patterns (function calling, structured outputs, retry logic) differentiates AI software engineers from general software engineers. Understanding cost optimization (caching strategies, model routing, batched inference) is valuable since inference costs can dominate application economics.

Strong postings describe the product you'll be building, the AI integration patterns you'll work with, and the scale requirements. Look for companies that have existing AI features and need engineers to improve and expand them, not companies that are 'planning to add AI' someday.

Compensation Benchmarks

AI Software Engineer roles pay a median of $220,000 based on 1,448 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $228,700. This role's midpoint ($170K) sits 23% below the category median. Disclosed range: $160K to $180K.

Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,400. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,230. The 90th percentile reaches $319,400. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($253,100) and Research Engineer ($252,000). By seniority level: Entry: $110,408; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $228,700; Director: $272,275; VP: $235,000.

Tax Relief Advocates AI Hiring

Tax Relief Advocates has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI Software Engineer. Based in Irvine, CA, US. Compensation range: $180K - $180K.

Location Context

Across all AI roles, 6% (568 positions) offer remote work, while 9,010 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (2,878 roles, $221,000 median); San Francisco (2,413 roles, $264,500 median); Los Angeles (1,340 roles, $210,000 median).

Career Path

Common paths into AI Software Engineer roles include Software Engineer, Full-Stack Developer, Backend Engineer.

From here, career progression typically leads toward Staff Engineer, AI Architect, Engineering Manager.

If you're a software engineer, you're already 80% there. Learn the AI integration patterns: RAG, streaming inference, function calling, structured outputs. Build a project that demonstrates you can wrap an AI model in a production-quality application with proper error handling, caching, and user experience. That's the portfolio piece that gets you hired.

What to Expect in Interviews

Technical screens look like standard software engineering interviews with an AI twist. Expect system design questions about building reliable applications around probabilistic models: handling streaming responses, implementing retry logic for API failures, and designing caching strategies for LLM outputs. Coding rounds test standard algorithms plus practical integration patterns like async processing and rate limiting.

When evaluating opportunities: Strong postings describe the product you'll be building, the AI integration patterns you'll work with, and the scale requirements. Look for companies that have existing AI features and need engineers to improve and expand them, not companies that are 'planning to add AI' someday.

AI Hiring Overview

The AI job market has 9,653 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 193 entry-level, 4,500 mid-level, 3,455 senior, and 1,505 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (568 positions). The remaining 9,010 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.

The market median for AI roles is $213,400. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,230. The 90th percentile reaches $319,400. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($253,100 median, 57 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 419 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($251,622 median, 51 roles).

AI Software Engineer roles are among the most numerous in the AI job market. Every company deploying AI needs software engineers who understand AI integration patterns. The demand is broad, spanning startups to enterprises, across every industry adopting AI capabilities.

The AI Job Market Today

The AI job market spans 9,653 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (7,301), Data Scientist (441), AI Software Engineer (438). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.

The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (193) are outnumbered by mid-level (4,500) and senior (3,455) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 1,505 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.

Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (568 positions), with 9,010 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.

AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $213,400. Top-quartile roles start at $264,230, and the 90th percentile reaches $319,400. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.

Category matters for compensation. AI Safety roles lead at $253,100 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $141,440. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.

The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,605 postings), Aws (916 postings), Azure (724 postings), Rag (634 postings), Gcp (522 postings), Pytorch (495 postings), Kubernetes (384 postings), Claude (383 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.

Frequently Asked Questions

Based on 1,448 roles with disclosed compensation, the median salary for AI Software Engineer positions is $220,000. Actual compensation varies by seniority, location, and company stage.
Full-stack engineering skills with AI integration experience. Python and TypeScript are the most common requirements. You'll need to understand API design, database architecture, and how to build reliable systems around probabilistic outputs. Experience with streaming, async processing, and caching patterns is increasingly important as real-time AI applications proliferate.
About 6% of the 9,653 AI roles we track offer remote work. Remote availability varies by company and seniority level, with senior and leadership roles more likely to offer location flexibility.
Tax Relief Advocates is among the companies actively hiring for AI and ML talent. Check our company profiles for detailed breakdowns of open roles, salary ranges, and hiring trends.
Common next steps from AI Software Engineer positions include Staff Engineer, AI Architect, Engineering Manager. Progression depends on whether you lean toward technical depth, people management, or product strategy.

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