What the role involves
At Podium, our mission is to arm every local business with a complete platform and outcome-driven AI employees that convert leads into real, paying customers. Every day, millions of workers use our AI lead conversion and communication platform to help them get more leads and make more money.
Our work and focus on helping local businesses thrive has been recognized across the industry, including Forbes’ Next Billion Dollar Startups, Forbes’ Cloud 100, the Inc. 5000, and Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Companies.
At Podium, we believe in fostering a culture that thrives on hiring and developing exceptional talent. Our operating principles serve as a compass, guiding daily behavior and decision-making, and ensure we hire people who will thrive at Podium. If you resonate with our operating principles and are energized by our mission, Podium will be a great place for you!
Staff AI Engineer
The Role
We are looking for a talented Staff AI Engineer to help build and scale our AI Agent platform—a powerful system that autonomously interacts with customers, handling millions of conversations every month. In this role, you’ll design and deliver the software that enables local businesses to manage complex customer interactions automatically, book more appointments, and serve their customers more effectively across multiple channels (e.g., voice, SMS, chat).
If you thrive in fast-paced, highly iterative environments, enjoy solving complex distributed systems challenges, and want to see your work drive immediate business impact, this role is for you!
What you will be doing
Build and scale the AI Agent platform — enabling high-volume, real-time conversational workflows that deliver accuracy and low latency at scale.
Design and implement APIs, services, and infrastructure that power multi-turn, cross-channel customer interactions.
Own the full lifecycle: architecture, implementation, deployment, and ongoing reliability.
Prototype rapidly, iterate with live interaction data, and continuously improve system performance and user experience.
Implement observability, monitoring, and operational best practices to ensure reliability in production, focusing on agent accuracy and latency.
Collaborate with engineers, product managers, and AI/ML scientists to deliver end-to-end features that power critical business outcomes.
What you should have
10+ years of professional software engineering experience with at least one modern language such as Go, Python, or Elixir.
1+ years of professional experience deploying and maintaining AI agents in production environments that interact with tools, APIs, or real-world workflows.
Proven success designing and maintaining distributed or high-throughput systems.
Strong problem-solving ability and comfort navigating ambiguity in large-scale systems.
Excellent communication skills and the ability to work effectively across teams.
A willingness to work across the entire stack—from infrastructure to APIs to user-facing components—wherever the problem needs solving.
Ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment with shifting priorities.
Must be willing to work on site, 5 days per week.
What we hope you have
2+ years of professional experience deploying and maintaining AI agents in production environments that interact with tools, APIs, or real-world workflows.
Practical experience designing and implementing evaluations for LLM behavior — including accuracy, safety, reliability, and cost monitoring.
Strong understanding of prompt design, context engineering, and guardrail strategies for dependable, interpretable agent behavior.
Experience with modern agent frameworks such as LangGraph, CrewAI, or AutoGen, including multi-step reasoning, memory, and orchestration patterns.
Hands-on experience with fine-tuning and data curation for improving model performance.
BENEFITS
Open and transparent culture
Life insurance, long and short-term disability coverage
Paid maternity and paternity leave
Fertility Benefits
Gener
About Podium
Podium is the all-in-one AI-powered lead management and communication platform used by more than 100,000 businesses to acquire and convert new customers. At the forefront of Podium’s innovation is its AI employee, who ensures businesses respond to leads instantly, anytime of the day or night—significantly increasing lead conversion rates and revenue. Podium helps businesses obtain more reviews, rank higher on Google, and consolidate lead channels. Businesses can call and text customers from the web and/or mobile app, send payment links, drive repeat business through bulk messages, and more—all managed and delivered from one easy-to-use dashboard. Additionally, with Podium’s AI Employee and automations, businesses can efficiently handle customer inquiries seamlessly across all communication channels, providing timely and accurate responses that drive sales. Podium’s innovative work has gained recognition on top industry lists, such as Forbes’ Next Billion Dollar Startups, Forbes’ Cloud 100, the Inc. 5000, and Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Companies. Podium was founded in 2014 and is headquartered in Lehi, Utah. It is currently backed by Accel, Summit Partners, GV (formerly Google Ventures), and Y Combinator.
Full Podium profile