Sr. Staff Engineer

About Betterment Betterment is a leading, technology-driven financial services company that offers investing, savings and retirement solutions for retail investors and investment advisors as well as financial wellness solutions, including a 401(k) for small and medium-sized businesses. Our team is passionate about our mission, to empower people to build wealth with confidence and ease.

We’re headquartered in NYC and offer hybrid NY-based positions (four days/ week in-office, with no required office days during the summer and winter holidays).

About The Role

The AI Platform team enables product teams across Betterment to build

useful

AI-powered features quickly, enjoyably, and responsibly. As Sr Staff Engineer, you will work with a team of senior/staff engineers delivering an expanding set of AI capabilities as well as shared infrastructure, LLM evaluation frameworks, and internal libraries.

You will help shape and lead the technical direction of our AI product development strategy, working closely with engineering leadership. You will collaborate with product and compliance partners to ensure Betterment's AI capabilities are developed with the rigor that our customers and regulators expect.

By joining us in the early days of our AI product efforts, you will have significant influence over how the organization delivers exciting features into the Betterment product across all lines of business.

This role is based out of our NYC office. Below we've reflected the base salary range we would offer for this position. Actual salaries may vary depending on factors including but not limited to location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of Betterment’s total compensation package for employees.

• New York City: $230,000 - $270,000

We offer a competitive equity package, health, dental and vision benefits, life and AD&D, short-term and long-term disability insurance, EAP, commuter and parking benefits FSA/HSA, and 401(k) with employer match as well as a flexible PTO policy. This job may also be eligible for variable compensation in the form of a company incentive bonus. For jobs based out of our NYC HQ, we require in office attendance Tuesday through Thursday, weekly.

A day in the life

• Work with a team of senior/staff engineers building the foundation that enables all Betterment teams to deploy AI features.

• Define and drive Betterment's AI platform strategy – the shared infrastructure, evaluation frameworks, internal libraries, and guardrails that allow product teams to build AI features with confidence and speed.

• Lead high-leverage projects that expand our organization’s AI technical capabilities, where AI organically enhances existing product value.

• Partner with product teams to ship customer-facing AI functionality to production. Develop broad Betterment domain expertise in the process.

• Partner with legal and compliance leaders to scale processes that enable teams to build AI functionality quickly and responsibly within a regulated financial services environment.

• Mentor and grow senior engineers, sharing your experience to expand their impact and accelerate their growth.

What We’re Looking For

• A strong technical lead capable of establishing the strategic vision for Betterment’s AI systems while also working hands-on alongside senior and staff IC colleagues to build it into reality.

• Deep expertise in LLM systems, including prompt engineering, agentic workflows, and evaluation systems.

• Experience operating AI features in production, ensuring quality and auditability via online and offline validation, automated monitoring, and human-in--the-loop oversight.

• Comfort operating at the frontier. The ability and drive to stay current with emerging tools, techniques, and best practices within the rapidly evolving AI ecosystem.

• Clear judgment about when to use AI and when not to, maintaining a grounded, pragmatic perspective on what we should ship to production today.

• Proven track record leading successful projects that affect and development workflows used by multiple teams.

• Fullstack development experience including React, GraphQL, and one or more server-side languages (Ruby, Java, TypeScript, C#, Python, etc.)

• Experience making sound build vs buy decisions.

• Ability to build trust and processes that transcend discipline and team boundaries.

• Principled approach to balancing the need to move quickly today with the need to move quickly tomorrow, with an appreciation of how to meet high standards for customer quality and regulatory requirements.

What Being At Betterment Means For You

We change lives

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