[Hiring] Staff Engineer, AI Automation @AvantStay

Role Description

We are seeking a Staff Engineer who will own AI automation across our business - building autonomous systems that monitor data, take action, involve humans when needed, and learn from feedback.

• Design and build autonomous agentic loops across business domains - monitoring listings performance, qualifying leads, resolving customer tickets, optimizing SEO content, and many more we haven't built yet.
• Own the full lifecycle: understand the business workflow, architect the agent, ship to production, monitor performance, iterate based on feedback.
• Connect agents to our data infrastructure - PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Kafka event streams, GraphQL APIs, MCPs, third-party integrations - so they can observe, reason, and act.
• Build human-in-the-loop escalation patterns where full autonomy isn't appropriate.
• Work directly with business stakeholders (revenue management, marketing, CX, sales) to identify automation opportunities and translate them into agent architectures.
• Untangle complexity in our existing systems to make them agent-accessible - wrapping services, building APIs for agents, MCP servers, creating clean data interfaces, and transforming existing ones.
• Establish patterns and tooling that help the broader engineering team deploy agents faster. Your work should multiply others, not just your own output.

Qualifications

• Deep understanding of agentic workflows and the current tooling landscape - orchestration, evals, agent SDKs (Claude Agent SDK, OpenAI Agents API, Vercel, PI, LangGraph), tool-use patterns, multi-step reasoning, structured outputs, and RAGs.
• Experience shipping production AI/LLM agent systems - not prototypes, not chatbots. Autonomous agents that take real actions in real systems.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals - you can navigate databases, event systems (Kafka), API protocols (GraphQL, REST), containers (Kubernetes), and cloud infrastructure (AWS).
• Our stack includes TypeScript and Scala (functional, Typelevel), Python - comfort reading and contributing to typed functional code is a plus, but deep Scala expertise is not required.
• Product instincts - you can talk to a revenue manager or sales, understand their workflow, and figure out what to automate without being handed a spec.
• Bias toward shipping. We value working software over documents.
• Fluency in English, both written and spoken, for effective communication in a distributed team.
• We value agency over experience. If you don't check every box but bring curiosity, drive, and a clear sense of purpose, we want to hear from you.

Requirements

• Background in property management, hospitality, or marketplace platforms.
• Experience with functional programming (Scala, Haskell, Clojure, Elixir).
• Experience with distributed systems, Clickhouse and Postgres.

Benefits

• Generous paid time off including company holidays.
• 100% remote - work from anywhere in the world.
• Complimentary and discounted stays at AvantStay properties.
• Periodic team gatherings.
• Budget for Greenfield AI Tooling.