Senior Software Engineer - AI Applications

About Us

Estate planning is vital for anyone who wants to ensure their loved ones are cared for when they’re gone. But traditional estate planning is broken. It’s confusing, expensive, and tedious, and it’s often done without regard to a person’s financial plan. Vanilla is here to change all that. We are reinventing estate planning for financial advisors, attorneys, and their clients. We’re transforming it into an ongoing conversation, where dense legal documents are brought to life through easy-to-understand visualizations, and considered in concert with clients’ financial plans and evolving life milestones and goals.

Vanilla is the world’s first estate advisory platform, built by advisors and estate professionals to help deliver a modern, visual estate planning experience to their clients. Harnessing a purpose-built AI engine called VAI, the Vanilla platform provides valuable insights to advisors and attorneys while demystifying the planning process for clients at all levels of wealth. Vanilla supports the entire estate planning process, including understanding client goals and current plans, visualizing the plan, and strategizing on taxes. Clients can even create trusts, healthcare directives, powers of attorney, and more through Vanilla. The Vanilla platform enables advisors, planners, and attorneys to foster stronger relationships, achieve greater retention, and help their clients build meaningful legacies.

Job Summary

Vanilla is seeking a Senior Software Engineer - AI Applications with a strong background in software development, data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. You will be utilizing existing Large Language Models to build applied AI applications focused on producing high accuracy rates. Your software engineer skills will come into play here as you’ll take ownership in constructing services to ingest structured results. If you’re a proactive problem-solver who lives to disrupt archaic processes with cutting-edge technology, this job is for you. You'll be working with a group of diverse designers, developers, operations managers, and attorneys, all of whom share a passion for building beautifully designed products and making complex processes user friendly.

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will work collaboratively with engineering and subject matter experts to find innovative and disruptive uses of AI to streamline (or replace) workflows. Please note that this is a fully remote position.

This role is a remote position, you must be based out of one of the following states: CA, CO, CT, DE, FL, GA, ID, IL, IN, KY, MA, MD, ME, MN, NC, NH, NJ, NY, OH, OK, PA, RI, SC, SD, TX, UT, VA, WA, or WA D.C.

Responsibilities 

• Machine learning and AI: You are passionate and knowledgeable about the current and future state of AI.
  • You will be utilizing existing Large Language Models to build applied AI applications focused on producing high accuracy rates. Your software engineer skills will come into play here as you'll take ownership in constructing services to ingest results.
  • You will work with product, and engineering teams and build models/services that can ingest data, extract key information and surface insights.
  • You can drive technical vision and leverage open source technologies and cloud services to build an AI/ML platform.
  • You can build tooling to support model training, evaluation, inference serving, monitoring and alerting.
  • You want to use the latest ML frameworks and open source tools to develop new model training pipelines.
• Hands On Coding: You have direct experience with software engineering and are familiar with modern languages like Python, Javascript, Go, Rust
  • You have experience building microservices and understand the tradeoffs of the approach.
• Data handling: You can identify, extract, transform, and load data from disparate sources into a centralized system. You are able to normalize, cleanse, and validate this data.
• Database management: You are able to design and implement schemas, optimize queries, and manage database performance.
• Project management: You must be an effective self-organizer: prioritize tasks, manage resources, and communicate effectively with non-technical stakeholders.
• Collaboration: We are one team. You must be able to collaborate with engineers, subject matter experts, product managers, and designers to ensure the success of projects.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years relevant work experience.
• Proficiency in, at least, one modern programming language such as Python or Javascript.
• Experience integrating with backend services, and APIs.
• Experience using software like OpenAI/ChatGPT.
• Strong knowledge of SQL (Structured Query Language) for querying and manipulating data.
• Experience in data normalization, data cleansing, and data validation techniques.
• Deep understanding of machine learning and AI technologies, including the ability to design, train, and implement machine learning models and use natural language processing techniques for automation.
• Experience with API design and implementation for accessing data from external sources.
• Ability to effectively articulate technical challenges and solutions.
• Deal well with ambiguous/undefined problems; ability to think abstractly.
• Knowledge of professional software engineering practices & best practices for the full software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build processes, testing, and operations.

Benefits

• Flexible paid time off policy and 12 company-wide paid holidays 
• Parental leave, 4 weeks for all full-time employees and up to 12 weeks for birthing parents
• Medical, dental, and vision benefits coverage for employees and their families 
• 401k match that can be initiated immediately upon hire 
• Budget for learning & development, health & wellness, and home office setup 

The compensation range for this role is $160,000 to $200,000. Our compensation packages also include a performance based bonus and equity. Compensation is based on a number of factors including market location and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.