Podium is a suite of messaging tools for local business. Using our platform, businesses of all sizes can connect with customers via text to do things like request payments, collect reviews, and sell products, in a modern, convenient way. Our work streamlining this process for local businesses has awarded us recognition on top industry lists, such as Forbes’ Next Billion Dollar Startups, Forbes’ Cloud 100, the Inc. 5000 (#13), and Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Companies — in the last year alone.

Headquartered in Lehi, Utah, and founded in 2014, Podium is currently backed by Accel, Summit Partners, GV (formerly Google Ventures), and Y Combinator.

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
• Generous vacation time, plus three 4-day summer holiday weekends
• Excellent medical, dental, and vision benefits
• 401k Plan with company matching
• Bi-annual swag drops with cool Podium gear and apparel 

Podium is an equal opportunity employer. Podium provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, genetic information, marital status or veteran status.

Our frontend stack is React with our back end in Elixir and PostgreSQL. We are looking for self-driven people who are creative problem solvers, that learn quickly, and can thrive in a fast paced environment with little guidance.