Senior ai engineer

About the Role

Kuali's platform organization has moved its engineering practice up a level of abstraction, and Senior AI Engineers are the people who make that practice work at scale.

Our AI Engineers build software by directing AI coding agents. They frame the problem, architect the solution, and author the specification the agents work from — intent, constraints, interfaces, acceptance criteria, and the implementation and test plan. They engineer the context those agents reason over, orchestrate multi-agent workflows through build, test, and review, and verify every result against the spec. And they continuously sharpen the system that produces the work: the reusable skills, instructions, and evaluation harnesses that make agent output reliable at enterprise scale. This is spec-driven, context-engineered development — the craft has moved up a level of abstraction, and architecture, judgment, and accountability remain firmly human. A Senior AI Engineer is accountable for the quality of both the software and the system that produces it.

As a Senior AI Engineer, you own a significant subsystem or product domain. You set the architectural direction within it, you define how agentic development is practiced on your team, and you are the technical anchor other engineers rely on. You lead the design and delivery of AI-native product capabilities that universities depend on, and you are trusted to make consequential decisions with limited supervision.

This role sits at the center of Kuali's competitive advantage. The engineers who can direct AI to build correct, maintainable enterprise systems — rather than merely generate code quickly — are scarce, and they are the reason our delivery velocity is what it is.

Who are we?

Kuali builds software solutions for higher education. We help our customers — colleges & universities — focus on providing a fantastic education to students by decreasing their administrative costs. We work in a competitive space, ripe for innovation, with users ready to be delighted.

Our Culture

As a company, we are guided by our cultural values: https://www.kuali.co/jobs#values

• Iterate to evolve
• Cultivate openness
• Act with accountability
• Assume the best
• Practice humility
• Deliver amazing experiences

At Kuali, we learn from and teach each other, we practice transparency and empathy, we delight in delivering value to our customers, and we WIN!

We work remotely, and have for years. Distributed work is in our bones, with a history of institutions working across state lines on open-source software for more than ten years. Our employees each work in the environment where they’re happiest, from Pennsylvania to Seattle. We work consciously to create a collaborative and healthy remote work culture, and we travel to meet in person a few times each year. We feel it’s important for employees to come to work refreshed and ready for the week so we have a four day work week policy, Monday-Thursday.

Everyone should love their work.

At Kuali, we embrace diversity and inclusion at every level. We value and respect individuals from all backgrounds, recognizing that a rich tapestry of experiences and perspectives fuels our success as a company and enriches our collective human experience.

What you’ll be responsible for

• Own the product backlog for Kuali Research, ensuring clarity, prioritization, and alignment with strategic goals.
• Translate customer feedback, institutional requirements, and product vision into actionable user stories and acceptance criteria.
• Collaborate daily with engineering and design teams to ensure timely, high‑quality delivery.
• Partner with Product Managers to refine roadmap priorities and validate outcomes against customer needs.
• Support release planning, sprint reviews, and retrospectives to drive continuous improvement.
• Serve as the voice of the customer within the scrum team, ensuring solutions meet real‑world research administration challenges.
• Monitor product performance and collaborate on data‑driven decisions to enhance usability and adoption.

About you

We’re looking for curious, enthusiastic, empathetic people to solve problems, execute on ideas, advocate for the customer, and contribute to a team culture built on trust and mutual respect.

We build and support systems using both Java and Node.js/React. We believe that great developers can always learn new tools. Above any specific tech stack, we’re looking for versatile developers — those who know when to think big and when to act small, and who are comfortable in both greenfield and refactoring projects.

We believe the best results are created by teams who represent a broad range of ideas and perspectives. We value employees with diverse backgrounds and experiences.

Ideal candidates have experience with:

• 3+ years of experience in product ownership, business analysis, or software delivery.
• Strong understanding of Agile/Scrum principles and backlog management.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills across technical and non‑technical teams.
• Ability to translate complex workflows into clear, actionable requirements.
• Passion for improving research administration processes and higher‑education outcomes.

We’d be delighted if you bring experience with:

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant ownership of production SaaS systems.
• Demonstrated mastery of agentic software development as a primary delivery practice, including designing reusable agent workflows, skills, and evaluation approaches.
• Deep proficiency across the modern web stack: JavaScript/TypeScript, React, Node.js, API design (REST and/or GraphQL), relational and document data stores.
• Strong distributed systems, cloud architecture (AWS), and CI/CD experience.
• Demonstrated ownership of production services, including on-call leadership and incident command.
• Track record of mentoring engineers.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Elixir, Kafka or comparable streaming technologies, and event-driven architecture.
• Experience shipping and operating LLM-backed product features at enterprise scale, including evaluation harnesses and guardrails.
• Experience in regulated environments (FERPA, SOC 2, TX-RAMP, HIPAA, FedRAMP, or similar).
• Multi-tenant enterprise SaaS at meaningful scale.
• Experience leading migrations or modernization of legacy systems.
• Familiarity with higher-education administrative systems.

Perks

• Remote-first work
• Top-of-the-line equipment of your choice to get your job done
• A truly exceptional benefits package including full premium coverage for employee and dependent medical and dental care
• 401(k) matching
• Employee stock option plan
• Paid Maternity/Parental leave
• All the paid time off you need (just work it out with your manager)
• Encouragement and support in learning and improving your skill-sets.
• Employee resource groups and community events