AI Native Senior Software Engineer

Title: AI Native Senior Software Engineer Location: Mesa, Arizona, United States

The Role
The AI Native Senior Software Engineer is a change agent and a driver of value within our public safety ecosystem. Public safety agencies, dispatchers, and first responders count on our software every day, so reliability and security come first. You will architect, own, and deliver innovation to customers and be accountable for the results it produces for our users and our business. You will work across the VersatermOS platform and our broader product portfolio, bringing deep technical and architecture knowledge together with AI native development practices to build solutions that are reliable, secure, scalable, and cost-efficient. You will also lead by example and help engineers on the team(s) adopt the same ways of working. You should be passionate about shaping the future of public safety and revel in the fact that no task is too small or too big to make a difference to the people we serve. You will own and shape product with your team, from idea through production, and set the direction and tone for generating value for our customers and business.
The Direction
This position will have the opportunity to contribute to several tech stacks across our public safety portfolio. Our direction is to build working solutions quickly using the full range of AI native tools and practices, including coding agents, spec-driven development, AI-assisted design and code review, automated test generation, and agent workflows built into our CI/CD pipelines. You will work closely with your team to do this without giving up the reliability, security, and quality our customers rely on. You will be a hands-on leader in this space, setting the example for how we use AI to deliver software and helping staff build the same skill set you have. The AI Native Senior Software Engineer should be passionate about agentic development, architecture, and driving innovation to help shape the future of our software products.
What You Do

• Lead the design and architecture of complex, scalable software solutions, ensuring they are secure, highly available, fault tolerant, maintainable, and optimized for performance.
• Take ownership of high-impact projects from understanding the user's problem through design, implementation, deployment, and support in production, and check that what you shipped delivered the value we expected.
• Mentor and provide guidance to associate engineers, helping them grow in their careers and improve their coding practices, including how they work with AI tools. Provide constructive feedback and assistance.
• Be a leader in how our teams use AI to deliver software. Try new tools and approaches, figure out what actually works for our products, and turn it into shared practices, agent configurations, and examples the rest of the team can pick up.
• Work closely with product managers, designers, customers, and other teams to deliver software in small increments of business value, using customer feedback and data to decide what comes next.
• Focus on optimizing application performance, ensuring that the software scales effectively under increased loads and performs reliably in production. Set service level objectives (SLOs) and put the monitoring and alerting in place to meet them.
• Support what you build in production. This includes taking part in on-call, leading the response when critical issues come up, and following through on post-incident reviews so the same problem doesn't happen twice.
• Lead efforts to resolve complex technical issues and make sure software meets business requirements. Catch defects before they reach customers through automated test suites that cover the depth and breadth of solutions, quality gates in the CI/CD pipeline, and safe release practices like feature flags, staged rollouts, and quick rollback.
• Build security into your work from the beginning with secure coding practices, threat modeling, dependency scanning, and least-privilege access. Protect sensitive data such as Criminal Justice Information (CJI) and personally identifiable information (PII) in line with the CJIS Security Policy and our internal standards.
• Review AI-generated code with the same care as code written by hand by utilizing modern methods and AI practices. You own every change you ship, and you will help set the review, testing, and data handling practices that let the team move quickly with AI while staying safe.
• Stay up to date with the latest industry trends, tools, and technologies, especially in the fast-moving AI space. Drive innovation and suggest improvements to the development process, architecture, and product features.
• Participate in daily collaboration with team members and retrospectives for work generated. Help the team break down complex tasks into quick achievable value increments.
• Ensure that code, system designs, and technical processes are well-documented for knowledge sharing and future reference by people and AI agents.
• Perform other related duties as assigned to support team objectives, departmental needs, and overall organizational priorities.

What You Bring
Required Qualifications: 

• Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent industry experience and training.
• 6+ years of professional software development experience.
• Advanced, hands-on experience delivering software with modern AI development tools and methods, including coding agents, spec-driven development, context engineering, and AI-assisted testing and code review, along with good judgment on how to verify what AI produces.
• A genuine passion for AI native development and experience leading a team through the adoption of new tools and ways of working.
• Advanced proficiency in one or more programming languages such as C#, Python, JavaScript, or similar.
• Deep understanding of software architecture, design patterns, and principles for delivering Software as a Service (SaaS). Experience in designing scalable and distributed systems.
• Experience building and running production systems with high availability requirements, including monitoring, incident response, and root cause analysis.
• Experience with DevOps and CI/CD practices, including continuous integration, continuous deployment, and tools like Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and Terraform.
• Experience with automated testing, test-driven development (TDD), and testing frameworks.
• Good understanding of secure development practices (for example OWASP Top 10, threat modeling, and secrets management) and experience applying security controls in software and DevOps processes.
• Strong leadership, communication, and collaboration skills. Ability to work cross-functionally with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to pass required background and security screening, including the fingerprint-based check required under the FBI CJIS Security Policy.

Asset Qualifications:

• Working knowledge of Microservices, SOA, Monolith, REST, RPC, SQL, NoSQL, etc.
• Experience building and evaluating AI harnesses, MCP servers, knowledge graphs, multi-agent workflows, and other agentic tooling.
• Experience managing cost and token usage across multiple AI models and providers.
• Experience setting up evaluations or other ways to measure the quality and impact of AI in the development process.
• Experience with real-time media processing algorithms and machine learning for transcribing and translating information.
• Expertise in optimizing and fine-tuning large-scale applications for performance, scalability, and high availability.
• Previous experience in mentoring or coaching associate engineers and fostering a positive, collaborative team culture.
• Experience in industries such as finance, healthcare, public safety or government.
• Familiarity with public safety and compliance standards such as CJIS, SOC 2, StateRAMP/FedRAMP, or NG911.

Note: Due to the nature of our work with public safety agencies, this position requires compliance with the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Security Policy. Candidates must successfully pass a comprehensive, fingerprint-based background check. Please note that specific customer contracts may impose additional security verification requirements. Obtaining and maintaining all required security clearances is a condition of employment. For more information on CJIS security requirements, please visit the FBI's CJIS Security Policy Resource Center.

Versaterm is committed to fair and equitable compensation that is competitive, consistent, and aligned with the value each role contributes to our organization. The starting salary for this position will be dependent upon many factors, such as the successful candidate’s skills, experience, education, training as well as internal equity, market data, and business needs. In addition to base salary and our comprehensive benefits offering, some roles may also be eligible for variable compensation such as incentive plans or discretionary performance bonuses.