Staff Software Engineer

Who We Are:

PeopleLoop is an AI-powered experience that modernizes benefits and PEO solutions for people-driven companies. It reduces complexity and errors across critical people operations, gives leaders clearer insight into compensation and benefits costs, trends, and tradeoffs, and delivers a more modern employee experience. Visit PeopleLoop.com or follow us on LinkedIn to learn more.

In this role, you will lead the design and delivery of the core services that every PeopleLoop product depends on-including events, audit, EDI, the compliance graph, and the enrollment orchestrator. You’ll also help build the platform our AI agents run on: tool contracts, retrieval over the compliance graph, LangGraph-style orchestration, and guardrails.

As a Staff-level engineer, you’ll set patterns, mentor engineers, drive design reviews and RFCs, and own the quality bar for critical platform systems. Most services are built in Python (FastAPI), with some in Node/TypeScript (NestJS).

What you get to do:

• Platform Architecture: Define clear system boundaries and ownership across Postgres (system of record), the compliance graph, Python (FastAPI) and Node/TypeScript (NestJS) services, event pipelines, AI agents, and external partners (carriers, EDI, payroll).

• Audit: Build and maintain an append-only, tamper-evident audit log across services. Provide query APIs for compliance and support use cases, with retention and legal-hold support. Ensure every AI agent action is audited end-to-end.

• EDI: Own 834 eligibility and 820 premium flows, including partner variants. Build carrier adapters with strong contract tests, reconciliation, and replay so new integrations are primarily configuration, not bespoke engineering work.

• Compliance Graph: Model jurisdictions, regulations, plans, and eligibility rules in Neptune (or Neo4j). Own graph modeling, bulk loading, query design, and safe retrieval APIs that services and AI agents use to answer “what applies here?”

• Enrollment Orchestrator: Design and evolve long-running workflows (Step Functions or Temporal) for open enrollment, QLEs, terminations, and carrier submission. Support agent-assisted steps, simulation vs. live runs, human approvals, and reliable replay and recovery.

• AI Agents & Platform: Help build the foundational agent platform: tool contracts over internal APIs and the compliance graph, retrieval and grounding, LangGraph or similar orchestration, prompt and model registries, evaluation harnesses, cost and latency controls, and PII-safe logging.

• Multi - Tenant Core: Design and maintain strong tenant isolation (RLS, per-tenant keys), API gateway and authorization (Cedar), secrets and KMS, rate limits, and quotas-including per-tenant agent budgets.

• Observability & Data: Deliver meaningful observability with OpenTelemetry traces, metrics, and logs across services and agent runs. Define SLOs that drive action. Own CDC from Postgres into the lake for analytics and agent evaluation datasets.

• Developer Experience: Improve developer velocity through shared Python and TypeScript libraries, OpenAPI/GraphQL code generation, and tests that cover workflows, integrations, graph queries, and agent behavior.

What you bring:

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with 2+ years at Senior or Staff level owning cross-team initiatives

• Strong production experience building Python services; working proficiency in Node/TypeScript

• Deep experience with MongoSQL, PostgreSQL and at least one of Kafka/MSK, Kinesis, or EventBridge

• Hands-on AWS experience, including Step Functions or a comparable workflow engine

• Shipped at least one LLM- or agent-backed feature to production, including retrieval, tool use, and guardrails (LangGraph, LangChain, LlamaIndex, or similar)

• Experience designing and operating multi-tenant systems with strong security and privacy guarantees

• Comfortable writing RFCs, mentoring engineers, and driving designs from concept through production

• Bachelor’s degree required, preferably in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline; equivalent experience will be considered.

Nice to have

• Benefits, PEO, or EOR domain experience (834, 820, QLE, COBRA, multi-country payroll or employment)

• Production use of graph databases (Neptune, Neo4j) with Cypher or Gremlin

• Workflow engines such as Temporal, Step Functions, or Airflow

• Authorization engines and policy-as-code (Cedar, OPA)

• CDC pipelines (Debezium, DMS) and lakehouse architectures

• DSLs or rules engines for carrier mappings or compliance checks

• Agent evaluation tooling (LangSmith, Ragas, Braintrust) and prompt or model registries

• Vector stores and hybrid retrieval (pgvector, OpenSearch, Pinecone)

• MCP servers, function-calling contracts, or structured-output patterns

Location requirement: This role is based in either of San Mateo or San Francisco Office.

Peopleloop’s Culture - Our most important asset

• Integrity

• Passion for service

• Innovative

• Growth oriented

• Caring for others

• Promise-centric

• Focused on relationship building

PeopleLoop provides equal opportunity to all applicants without regard to race, color, creed, religion, citizenship, national origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, pregnancy, marital status, military or veteran status, disability, or any other basis prohibited by applicable law.

Compensation & Benefits

PeopleLoop provides competitive compensation including base salary, performance-based bonus programs, equity, and comprehensive benefits package.

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