Senior Software Engineer, AI Developer Experience

Job description

At Vanta, our mission is to help businesses earn and prove trust. We believe that security should be monitored and verified continuously, and we empower companies to practice better security and prove it with ease. Vanta has a kind and talented team, and while some have prior security experience, many have been successful at Vanta without it.

Build the systems, infrastructure, and developer workflows that make AI-powered engineering more useful, reliable, and easy for Vanta engineers to adopt.

The AI DX team is building the foundations for a more autonomous software development experience at Vanta, including background agents, agent evaluation systems, and tooling that helps engineers work more effectively with AI. The team combines software engineering, developer experience, AI systems, and product thinking to turn emerging capabilities into reliable workflows used in real engineering work.

As a Senior Software Engineer on the AI DX team, you’ll help shape these systems from the ground up. You’ll work directly with engineers to understand friction in their workflows, build practical solutions, and use evidence from real usage to continuously improve quality, reliability, and adoption.

Visit our Vanta Engineering Blog to learn more about what our team is working on!

What you’ll do as a Senior Software Engineer at Vanta:

• Plan, build, and improve background-agent infrastructure that enables reliable, trackable, and repeatable automated engineering work.
• Develop systems for evaluating agent performance using task outcomes, quality measures, human intervention, cost, and other signals.
• Create evaluation sets and feedback loops that help AI systems improve over time through regular review, tuning, and correction.
• Improve how engineers discover, understand, and use shared AI tools and workflows.
• Evaluate AI development tools, including code generation, AI-assisted review, and testing, against real engineering needs, and help integrate the ones that prove useful.
• Develop visibility into which tools and workflows are useful, where they create friction, and how they should evolve.
• Create clear guidance and documentation that helps engineers adopt new AI-enabled development practices.
• Improve code review workflows by using feedback from real engineering work to identify and address recurring friction.
• Influence the foundations of an autonomous software factory, including systems that help agents complete bounded engineering tasks safely and effectively.
• Work directly with engineers and internal users to understand their needs, validate solutions, and make thoughtful product tradeoffs.
• Help the team move ambiguous, dependency-heavy projects from early exploration through reliable delivery.
• Raise the quality bar through thoughtful code reviews, technical design discussions, testing, observability, and attention to reliability and security.
• Partner closely with engineers and cross-functional stakeholders while contributing as a dependable, collaborative teammate.

How to be successful in this role:

• Substantial industry software engineering experience.
• Experience taking technical leadership roles on teams or complex projects.
• Experience improving AI systems, creating evaluation sets, and driving quality hill-climbing through measurement and iteration.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience designing, building, testing, and operating reliable systems.
• Experience with developer tooling, AI-enabled workflows, agentic systems, infrastructure, or related technical domains.
• A track record of working through ambiguity, decomposing complex problems, managing dependencies, and helping projects reach completion.
• Experience working in rapidly scaling startups or larger companies, particularly in environments with a strong bias for action.
• An action-oriented approach and a willingness to engage directly with users and contribute hands-on.
• Product judgment and curiosity: you bring strong technical opinions while staying focused on building platforms that meet users where they are.
• Strong written and verbal communication, with the ability to explain technical concepts clearly and create guidance that helps others adopt new tools.
• A collaborative approach and a demonstrated ability to make meaningful contributions as part of a team.
• Uses AI in day-to-day work to amplify their skills and strengthen their outcomes, applying it across routine workflows, actively building fluency through experimentation, and exercising sound judgment to ensure AI-assisted work meets a high quality bar.

What you can expect as a Vanta’n:

• Industry-competitive salary and equity
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage, with 100% of employee-only benefit premiums covered for most medical plans
• 16 weeks paid Parental Leave for all new parents
• Health & wellness stipend
• Remote workspace, internet, and cellphone stipend
• Commuter benefits for team members who report to the SF and NYC office
• Family planning benefits
• Matching 401(k) contribution with immediate vesting
• Flexible PTO policy, plus 80 hours of Sick Time
• 11 company-paid holidays
• Virtual team building activities, lunch and learns, and other company-wide events!
• Offices in SF, NYC, London, Dublin, Tel Aviv, and Sydney

To provide greater transparency to candidates, we share base pay ranges for all US-based job postings regardless of state. We set standard base pay ranges for all roles based on function, level, and country location, benchmarked against similar-stage growth companies. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors and may vary based on candidate location, skills, depth of work experience, and relevant licenses/credentials.

#LI-remote

At Vanta, we are committed to hiring diverse talent of different backgrounds and as such, it is important to us to provide an inclusive work environment for all. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, gender identity, age, religion, sexual orientation, veteran or disability status, or any other protected class. As an equal opportunity employer, we encourage and welcome people of all backgrounds to apply.

About Vanta

We started in 2018, in the wake of several high-profile data breaches. Online security was only becoming more important, but we knew firsthand how hard it could be for fast-growing companies to invest the time and manpower it takes to build a solid security foundation. Vanta was inspired by a vision to restore trust in internet businesses by enabling companies to improve and prove their security. From our early days automating security monitoring for compliance standards like SOC 2, HIPAA and ISO 27001 to creating the world's leading Trust Management Platform, our vision remains unchanged.

Now more than ever, making security continuous—not just a point-in-time check— is essential. Thousands of companies rely on Vanta to build, maintain and demonstrate their trust— all in a way that's real-time and transparent.

Referral Instructions

If you are being referred for the role, please contact that person to apply on your behalf.