Staff AI Engineer

Invitation Homes set out to solve a real problem: home leasing options were limited and the experience for renters was inconsistent. Today, as the nation’s largest single-family home rental company, our engineering teams build the technology at the center of that solution: personalized resident experiences, service tools, and the operational systems that residents and associates depend on every day. When we ship, people feel it.

We’ve built an engineering culture that takes that responsibility seriously: collaborative teams, high standards, and a genuine investment in the people around you. Great software is built by engineers who are supported, growing, and proud of what they ship. This role maps to what many organizations call a Staff Software Engineer, where deep technical expertise and cross-team influence come together. You’ll move where the need is greatest: embedding with teams to solve their hardest problems while building the shared standards, tools, and practices that lift every team. You’ll remain a hands-on engineer throughout, but your reach is the whole department, not a single team.

Our Staff AI Engineer is a new role created to help accelerate our organization’s AI journey, improving the quality of life for our associates, especially our software engineers, who use AI every day to write, test, and deploy. We have an immediate need to expand our agentic AI capabilities, which this role will have a direct impact on.

From here, you’ll have a clear path to Principal Engineer, where your impact expands to the full engineering organization and shapes its long-term technical direction.

What You’ll Do

Technical Leadership

• Remain a hands-on engineer: write code, contribute to architectural decisions, and ship; your technical credibility is the foundation of your influence.
• Embed with teams as a focused technical resource: accelerate delivery, address deep technical challenges, mentor engineers, and transition out once the team is unblocked and empowered.
• Take ownership of the hardest technical AI decisions facing the teams you support; provide the clarity and decisiveness that enables teams to move forward.
• Leave behind clear artifacts (documentation, diagrams, utilities, or design patterns) that continue to support the team after you move on.
• Identify AI related patterns and shared needs across teams; you’ll surface them into the shared AI platform and contribute directly to its growth.
• Set and drive engineering standards that allow our coding agents to elevate code quality, reliability, and maintainability across the department.
• Build and ship production-grade backend services that power AI-driven features residents and associates rely on.
• Apply AI to modernize and automate operational workflows across a 100,000+ home portfolio.
• Tune prompts, reasoning chains, and retrieval strategies including RAG/LLM as Wiki against Invitation Homes data.
• Own observability of AI systems in production: monitor performance, safety, and cost across LLM-driven features.

• Serve as an authority and mentor across core AI technologies and architectural patterns used throughout the organization.
• Shape architectural decisions with a long-term, strategic mindset: optimizing for agentic scalability, maintainability, and alignment with business goals.
• Apply core engineering principles to navigate unfamiliar technologies with confidence; adapt and operate effectively across varied tech stacks.
• Maintain a broad understanding of engineering workflows, standards, architectural decision records (ADRs), and the system landscape to provide relevant context and promote alignment across teams.
• Build reference implementations of agentic use cases: prompt engineering practices and use-case patterns on top of the shared eval frameworks and MCP/LLM gateways owned at the platform level.

• Write and present proposals that influence technical direction across multiple teams.
• Facilitate architectural reviews and technical deep dives with clarity and empathy.
• Coach engineers in how to document, diagram, and communicate their technical thinking effectively.
• Translate complex technical risk into understandable trade-offs for stakeholders at all levels.
• Drive conversations toward clarity: reduce complexity, build alignment across teams, and help everyone commit and move forward once a direction is set.

• Act as a multiplier for the engineering organization: raise the bar through mentorship, coaching, and influence across teams.
• Facilitate cross-team learning: architecture guilds, postmortems, engineering summits, or regular knowledge-sharing sessions.
• Own and improve AI engineering processes, standards, and tools that support a healthy and effective engineering organization.
• Mentor engineers on AI at multiple levels, helping them grow in technical depth and expand their reach.
• Maintain a bias to action across the teams you support: draw on AI tooling and insights to help teams automate the mundane.
• Model intellectual humility, curiosity, high standards, and a genuine investment in the people around you; the culture you carry shapes the culture of the teams you touch.

• 8+ years of professional software development experience, with a demonstrated track record of technical impact beyond team boundaries.
• 1+ years developing and deploying production-ready AI features including LLM-dependent applications, RAG systems, agents, and evals.
• Deep expertise in software architecture, system design, and distributed systems.
• Deep understanding of LLM evaluation methods: prompt testing, hallucination detection, and cost/performance tradeoffs.
• Experience building custom eval pipelines using techniques like model-as-a-judge or embedding similarity.
• Hands-on experience with agentic frameworks such as LangGraph, AutoGen, or CrewAI, preferably in TypeScript.
• Experience creating shared tools, frameworks, standards, or guidance adopted across multiple teams.
• Exceptional communication skills (written and verbal) with experience writing proposals and influencing technical direction at a department level.
• A track record of mentoring and coaching engineers across levels and teams.
• A drive to raise the bar: for yourself, the standards you champion, and the engineers you develop.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms, CI/CD practices, and modern iterative software delivery.
• A degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Our engineering teams work with TypeScript, Node.js, React, PostgreSQL, and AWS, including Lambda, DynamoDB, and RDS. We practice CI/CD, favor infrastructure as code, and build on REST APIs and event-driven architectures. Salesforce is a significant part of our technology landscape: some teams build directly on the platform, while others integrate with Salesforce-managed APIs. Our AI engineering work uses AWS Bedrock and LangGraph for orchestration, Snowflake for data, and Anthropic and OpenAI as model providers. Experience with these is a strong plus, though we care more about depth of thinking, adaptability, and the drive to keep learning than familiarity with any specific tool.

Physical and Mental Demands

This position will spend long hours sitting and using office equipment and computers. The position may also entail light lifting of supplies and materials occasionally, up to and including 20 pounds in addition to reaching, stooping, standing, and walking. This position requires the ability to talk, hear, compare, compute, compile, copy, analyze, coordinate, synthesize, negotiate and communicate. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential job functions.

Work Environment

Standard office working environment that may be busy and noisy at times.

Salary Range

The salary range for this position is: $120,000.00 - $208,000.00, plus individuals may be eligible for an annual discretionary bonus. Actual compensation within the range will be dependent upon the individual's skills, experience, qualifications, location, and applicable employment laws.

Compensation And Benefits

To attract and retain top talent, we're pleased to offer competitive compensation and benefits, including:

• Annual bonus program
• Health, dental, vision, and life insurance
• Long-term and short-term disability insurance
• Generous paid time off plans include vacation accrual, sick time, standard holidays and floating holidays
• 401(k) with company matching contributions
• Awesome work environment with casual dress
• Team events and gatherings (Pre- and Post-Covid)

To all recruitment agencies: Invitation Homes does not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to Invitation Homes employees. Invitation Homes is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.