Staff Engineer, Ai & Agentic Development

About StavPay

StavPay is a SaaS platform that automates accounts-payable workflows, payment processing, and financial operations for hedge funds, private equity firms, fund administrators and family offices. The platform handles invoice capture, approval routing, vendor management, multi-entity accounting, and payment execution.

We are entering a new phase of product development: embedding AI and agentic capabilities directly into our platform to transform how financial operations teams work. This is the most important technical initiative at StavPay, and this role will lead it.

About the Role

We are hiring a Staff Engineer to own the architecture, design, and delivery of AI-powered and Agentic features across StavPay. This is not an ML research role - it is a product engineering role for someone who can take large language models, tool-use patterns, and agentic frameworks and ship them as reliable, production-grade features that financial operations teams depend on daily. This role works alongside Lead Engineers who run the engineering team’s day-to-day delivery; the Staff Engineer owns architecture, patterns, and technical direction across both AI features and the broader platform.

You will define how AI is integrated into StavPay: which workflows become agentic, how models interact with our domain data, how we build trust and safety into autonomous financial operations, and how we evolve the platform architecture to support these capabilities at scale.

This is a high-autonomy, high-impact role. You will work across the full stack - from prompt engineering and model orchestration to API design, data pipelines, and frontend integration - and collaborate closely with product, design, and domain experts to ship features that meaningfully change how our clients operate.

Tech Stack & Environment

You will work across the following stack. Deep expertise in every layer is not required—but you should be comfortable navigating a polyglot codebase and making architectural decisions that span these technologies.

· Cloud - Microsoft Azure (App Services, Functions, Storage, Service Bus, Key Vault)

· Backend - Python (primary for AI/agentic work); existing platform services in C# / .NET/ Python

· Frontend - Angular / TypeScript

· Database - SQL Server

· Architecture - Containerized microservices (Docker, Azure Container Apps / AKS) and Azure App Services

· DevOps - Azure DevOps (CI/CD pipelines, repos, boards)

· AI Tooling - Claude, Codex CLI and Cursor for agentic development workflows

· Integrations - MCP servers, REST APIs, payment rails (NACHA, ISO 20022, SWIFT), accounting system APIs

Key Responsibilities

Agentic Architecture & System Design

• Design and build the core agentic infrastructure for StavPay: agent orchestration, tool-use frameworks, memory/context management, and guardrails for autonomous financial workflows.

• Define the architecture for how LLMs interact with StavPay’s domain model: invoices/contracts/purchase orders, approvals, vendor records, payment instructions, payment orchestration, accounting entries - safely and reliably.

• Build and maintain MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers and integrations that expose StavPay’s capabilities as tools for AI agents and external AI platforms used by our clients.

• Design patterns for human-in-the-loop oversight, approval gates, and escalation paths in agentic financial workflows.

AI Feature Development

• Lead development of AI-powered product features: intelligent invoice processing, automated approval routing, anomaly detection, natural-language querying of financial data, and predictive cash-flow analysis.

• Build and iterate on prompt chains, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, and multi-step agent workflows tailored to financial operations.

• Implement evaluation frameworks: automated testing for AI outputs, regression detection, quality scoring, and production monitoring for model-driven features.

• Own the integration layer between LLM providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.) and StavPay’s backend-model selection, fallback strategies, cost optimization, and latency management.

Technical Leadership

• Set technical direction for AI/agentic development across the engineering team. Write RFCs, architectural decision records, and technical specifications.

• Mentor engineers on AI integration patterns, prompt engineering, evaluation methodology, and safe deployment of model-driven features.

• Establish engineering standards for AI features: testing practices, monitoring, incident response, and responsible AI guidelines specific to financial data.

• Drive build-vs-buy decisions for AI tooling, frameworks, and infrastructure. Evaluate emerging tools and frameworks and make pragmatic adoption recommendations.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with product management to identify high-value AI use cases, scope MVPs, and define success criteria grounded in client outcomes.

• Work with the implementation team to understand client workflows and pain points that AI can address.

• Collaborate with security and compliance to ensure AI features meet regulatory requirements for financial data handling, auditability, and data privacy.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant time spent building production systems at scale.

• 3+ years of hands-on experience building AI/ML-powered product features, including at least 1+ year shipping LLM-powered or agentic features into production (not research prototypes, but shipped software that real users depend on).

• Deep experience with LLM integration: prompt engineering, function/tool calling, RAG architecture, agent orchestration, and evaluation frameworks.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals: system design, API design, data modeling, distributed systems, and production operations.

• Strong proficiency in Python. Working knowledge of TypeScript is a plus.

• Track record of leading technical initiatives that span multiple teams or systems, with strong written communication (RFCs, design docs, ADRs).

• Demonstrated ability to work with ambiguity — translating broad product goals into concrete technical plans and shipping iteratively.

Preferred Qualifications

• Strongly preferred: Hands-on experience building MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers or production integrations. Stavtar runs MCP-first agentic infrastructure, and this experience is one of the most differentiating signals for this role.

• Experience with at least one modern AI/agent framework (LangChain, LlamaIndex, Anthropic tool use, OpenAI Assistants, or similar) and a clear-eyed view of their trade-offs.

• Familiarity with SQL and relational databases.

• Comfort reading and integrating with C# / .NET services. You will design how AI features interact with the existing platform, but you will not be expected to build primarily in C#.

• Domain experience in FinTech, payments, accounting automation, fund administration, or financial operations.

• Experience with AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) and a philosophy for how they change engineering workflows.

• Background in building trust and safety systems for AI: content filtering, output validation, human-in-the-loop patterns, and audit logging for autonomous actions.

• Experience with Azure cloud services, SQL Server, or Azure DevOps.

• Familiarity with financial data formats and integrations: NACHA, ISO 20022, SWIFT, or accounting system APIs (QuickBooks, NetSuite, Sage).

• Prior experience at a Staff/Principal level or as a founding/early engineer at a startup where you shaped technical direction.