Staff Software Engineer

About our Marketplace Enablement Org and User Dialogue Team

Within Marketplace Enablement, we build the technology that helps candidates and recruiters find the right match. Our teams deliver data products, search and recommendations, and intelligent user dialogue capabilities using modern engineering practices, AI and cloud-native technology.

Within this org, our User Dialogue team, are building the next generation of conversational and agentic AI experiences. This includes intelligent candidate engagement, personalised outreach, messaging journeys, and AI powered systems that support users through complex recruitment journeys.

By joining this team, you will be playing a vital role as together we reimagine the labour market to make it work for everybody.

The Role

We are recruiting for a Staff Software Engineer (AI) to help design, build and evolve production grade agentic AI systems. This is a strategic, hands on engineering leadership role focused on integrating Large Language Models into scalable, secure, reliable and observable architectures. This is an individual contributor leadership role with no direct line management responsibility.

You will help move our agentic AI capabilities beyond experimentation and into dependable products that operate safely and effectively at scale across our global marketplace. Working closely with software engineers, machine learning engineers, data scientists, product managers, analysts and technical leaders, you will shape how we build, test, deploy, monitor and govern AI powered systems.

Success in this role will depend as much on influence and communication as on technical depth. You will need to create alignment across teams, explain complex concepts clearly, and help others make confident, pragmatic decisions.

• Design, architect and deliver agentic, LLM powered systems in AWS, ensuring production readiness, scalability, reliability and security.
• Provide technical leadership to evolve AI solutions from experimentation into robust, observable and maintainable products.
• Collaborate cross functionally with product, engineering, ML and data teams to align technical decisions with user needs, business priorities and long term platform strategy.
• Define and drive engineering standards, reusable patterns, tools and best practices for building responsible, consistent and scalable AI systems.
• Lead large scale implementation and deployment, ensuring excellence across testing, monitoring, evaluation, guardrails and operational support, while clearly communicating architectural decisions and mentoring engineers to raise overall engineering quality.

• Strong Staff level software engineering background with expertise in Python and at least one of Java, TypeScript or .NET, and a proven track record delivering production grade systems.
• Experience designing, building and operating distributed systems on AWS (or similar cloud platforms), including secure development, data protection, compliance and enterprise architecture principles.
• Hands on experience integrating LLMs into production, including use of APIs (e.g. OpenAI, Bedrock), prompt orchestration, tool usage and interaction patterns.
• Expertise in AI system design including state management, memory strategies, evaluation approaches, guardrails, observability and performance optimisation for LLM powered systems.
• Strong communication and influencing skills, with experience mentoring engineers and driving high standards across teams while engaging both technical and non technical stakeholders.

We're a community here that cares as much about your life outside work as how you feel when you're with us. Because your job shouldn't take over your life, it should enrich it. Here are some of the benefits we offer:

• 29 days holiday allowance + bank holidays
• Private medical and dental healthcare
• Matching pension contribution of 4 or 5% (after 3 years of service up to 10%)
• 24/7 Employee Assistance Programme
• Life Assurance Cover
• Cycle to work scheme
• Hybrid working model (3 days working from the office)
• Volunteering days
• and you can bring your dog to the office on Mondays and Fridays!

Equal opportunities are important to us. We believe that diversity and inclusion at The Stepstone Group are critical to our success as a global company, so we want to recruit, develop, and keep the best talent. We encourage applications from everyone, regardless of background, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability status, ethnicity, belief, age, family or parental status, and any other characteristic.

As a global business we further our DEI and sustainability progress by working with national and international bodies and are proud to have been recognised for our work - both locally and internationally, including:

• Armed Forces Covenant: Silver Award, Employer Recognition Scheme
• EcoVadis: Bronze Award
• Fertility Friendly Employer, accredited by Fertility Matters at Work
• RIDI (Recruitment Industry Disability) Awards: Inclusive Technology Award 2024
• Stonewall: Gold Award
• Stonewall: Top 100 Workplace Equality Index (85)