Senior Software Engineer - AI Infrastructure

The Cornerstone Research Data Science Center is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design, build, harden, and scale infrastructure that powers AI applications across the firm. This is a hands-on role within a versatile software engineering team that operates with a high degree of autonomy and scope. You will co-own the platform layer beneath the firm’s AI tooling, including inference gateways, containerized environments, and observability tools. The work is a mix of building new capabilities and hardening existing infrastructure in a domain where confidentiality, isolation, and reliability are critical. This role is ideal for an engineer who enjoys building products and services for other developers: someone equally comfortable standing up a new service, tracing a request across the platform to determine why it was slow, figuring out why a container works locally and fails on the host, and replacing a manual deployment step with a pipeline. You will work closely with engineers who own the platform layer and developers who build on it. ## Essential Job Functions - Platform Ownership: Design, build, and operate the systems and shared infrastructure that AI applications at the firm depend on. - Observability & Reliability: Own metrics, logs, and traces for the platform. Instrument services, build dashboards and alerts, and use telemetry to diagnose and resolve performance and reliability issues. - Hardening & Operations: Improve the resilience, security posture, and operational maturity of existing systems. - Developer Enablement: Provide the tooling, environments, and deployment paths that let application developers ship AI agents and workflows onto the platform quickly and safely. Treat internal developers as your users. - Collaboration: Partner with engineers, data scientists, product managers, and corporate departments, including Security and IT, to understand requirements, communicate tradeoffs, and deliver platform capabilities that fit how the firm works. ## Required Experience, Skills & Education - BA/BS with 4+ years of professional software, platform, infrastructure, or DevOps engineering experience, or a Master’s or PhD in a quantitative field such as Computer Science, Math, or Economics with 2+ years of industry experience. - Strong fundamentals in system design, with the ability to build reliable systems that handle sensitive data with high reliability. - Demonstrated ability to work across technology stacks and pick up new languages or frameworks quickly. - Experience using AI-powered coding assistants to accelerate development and strong interest in staying at the forefront of AI-enabled engineering. - Familiarity with building AI agents, such as using the Claude Agent SDK, and with running agents safely in sandboxed environments. - Deep, practical experience with environment isolation concepts and container solutions such as Docker, Podman, or Bubblewrap. - Hands-on experience with metrics, logging, and distributed tracing, ideally with the Grafana ecosystem and OpenTelemetry. - Ability to clearly articulate technical tradeoffs, document systems well, and explain progress to technical peers and non-technical stakeholders. ## Preferred Experience - Experience configuring and operating reverse proxies or API gateways, such as Nginx, including routing, TLS, authentication, rate limiting, and request/response handling. - Solid understanding of service connectivity across hosts and networks, including HTTP, gRPC, TCP, TLS, DNS, service discovery, ports, and subnets. - Experience with GitLab CI or similar pipelines and infrastructure-as-code or configuration management tools such as Terraform and Ansible. - Exposure to Kubernetes or similar orchestration systems. - Experience operating across on-premises and cloud infrastructure. - Familiarity with SSO/OIDC, identity and access management, secrets management, and audit logging. - Experience building infrastructure within professional services, legal, financial, or highly regulated industries. ## Application Requirements - Resume - Cover Letter - Code Portfolio, if applicable, uploaded under Additional DocumentsCornerstone Research will provide visa support to full-time candidates. If applying from within the US, candidates should have at least 12 months remaining of work authorization. The base salary for the Senior Software Engineer role is $215,000-$235,000. In addition to the base salary, new Software Engineers will be eligible for a signing bonus depending on skills, education, and experience. Software Engineers are also eligible for discretionary bonuses based on case performance, firm contributions, and other factors.