Staff AI Engineer

Job Summary Invitation Homes set out to solve a real problem: home leasing options were limited and the experience for renters was inconsistent. Today, as the nation's largest single-family home rental company, our engineering teams build the technology at the center of that solution: personalized resident experiences, service tools, and the operational systems that residents and associates depend on every day. When we ship, people feel it. We've built an engineering culture that takes that responsibility seriously: collaborative teams, high standards, and a genuine investment in the people around you. Great software is built by engineers who are supported, growing, and proud of what they ship. This role maps to what many organizations call a Staff Software Engineer, where deep technical expertise and cross-team influence come together. You'll move where the need is greatest: embedding with teams to solve their hardest problems while building the shared standards, tools, and practices that lift every team. You'll remain a hands-on engineer throughout, but your reach is the whole department, not a single team. Our Staff AI Engineer is a new role created to help accelerate our organization's AI journey, improving the quality of life for our associates, especially our software engineers, who use AI every day to write, test, and deploy. We have an immediate need to expand our agentic AI capabilities, which this role will have a direct impact on. From here, you'll have a clear path to Principal Engineer, where your impact expands to the full engineering organization and shapes its long-term technical direction. What You'll Do Technical Leadership • Remain a hands-on engineer: write code, contribute to architectural decisions, and ship; your technical credibility is the foundation of your influence. • Embed with teams as a focused technical resource: accelerate delivery, address deep technical challenges, mentor engineers, and transition out once the team is unblocked and empowered. • Take ownership of the hardest technical AI decisions facing the teams you support; provide the clarity and decisiveness that enables teams to move forward. • Leave behind clear artifacts (documentation, diagrams, utilities, or design patterns) that continue to support the team after you move on. • Identify AI related patterns and shared needs across teams; you'll surface them into the shared AI platform and contribute directly to its growth. • Set and drive engineering standards that allow our coding agents to elevate code quality, reliability, and maintainability across the department. • Build and ship production-grade backend services that power AI-driven features residents and associates rely on. • Apply AI to modernize and automate operational workflows across a 100,000+ home portfolio. • Tune prompts, reasoning chains, and retrieval strategies including RAG/LLM as Wiki against Invitation Homes data. • Own observability of AI systems in production: monitor performance, safety, and cost across LLM-driven features. Knowledge & Standards • Serve as an authority and mentor across core AI technologies and architectural patterns used throughout the organization. • Shape architectural decisions with a long-term, strategic mindset: optimizing for agentic scalability, maintainability, and alignment with business goals. • Apply core engineering principles to navigate unfamiliar technologies with confidence; adapt and operate effectively across varied tech stacks. • Maintain a broad understanding of engineering workflows, standards, architectural decision records (ADRs), and the system landscape to provide relevant context and promote alignment across teams. • Build reference implementations of agentic use cases: prompt engineering practices and use-case patterns on top of the shared eval frameworks and MCP/LLM gateways owned at the platform level. Communication & Collaboration • Write and present proposals that influence technical direction across multiple teams. • Facilitate architectural reviews and technical deep dives with clarity and empathy. • Coach engineers in how to document, diagram, and communicate their technical thinking effectively. • Translate complex technical risk into understandable trade-offs for stakeholders at all levels. • Drive conversations toward clarity: reduce complexity, build alignment across teams, and help everyone commit and move forward once a direction is set. Leadership & Culture • Act as a multiplier for the engineering organization: raise the bar through mentorship, coaching, and influence across teams. • Facilitate cross-team learning: architecture guilds, postmortems, engineering summits, or regular knowledge-sharing sessions. • Own and improve AI engineering processes, standards, and tools that support a healthy and effective engineering organization. • Mentor engineers on AI at multiple levels, helping them grow in technical depth and expand their reach. • Maintain a bias to action acr