AI Software Developer Jobs in Palo Alto, CA
AI Software Developer jobs in Palo Alto are in high demand, with openings concentrated in the Stanford Research Park, Downtown Palo Alto, and the University Avenue corridor across AI infrastructure, enterprise software, and consumer technology. Tesla, Rivian, and SpaceX are among the employers actively hiring right now. Find a role that fits below and apply directly.
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About the Role
We are building a fleet of specialized AI services that improve high-value human workflows across the company. As a Senior Software Engineer, Core AI, you will design, build, evaluate, and operate production-grade AI services and agents. You will own work end to end—from data and context design through tool use, application logic, evaluation, and production monitoring.
What You'll Do:
- Build specialized AI services: design and implement task-specific services and agents, including data serialization, retrieval, memory where appropriate, tool integrations, and bounded multi-step reasoning.
- Define and evaluate quality: work with partners to make expected behavior explicit, write and maintain evals against representative examples, and use results to measure performance against expectations.
- Improve quality systematically: use evaluation findings, failure analysis, and production feedback to improve context and data, service logic, tools, and model behavior.
- Build for production: integrate tracing, observability, versioning, monitoring, reliability practices, and success metrics into the services you own.
- Run controlled experiments: compare models, data, and implementation approaches using repeatable benchmarks so improvements are attributable and reproducible.
- Partner on architecture: work with AI Architecture, AI Ops, and Platform teams to make services secure, reliable, cost-aware, and deployable at scale.
- Ship iteratively: move quickly from user problem to prototype to production, learning from real workflow outcomes.
What We're Looking For:
- 5+ years of strong software engineering experience delivering production services or products, ideally at senior or staff level.
- Hands-on experience building AI/LLM-powered applications or agents with real users or operational use.
- Experience with evaluation methods for AI behavior: defining expected outcomes, building test sets or evals, tracking regressions, and acting on results.
- A data-first mindset: able to shape retrieval, context, and serialization to give a model the information needed for the task.
- Good judgment about tool use, autonomy, human review, failure handling, privacy, reliability, latency, and cost.
- A product-minded approach focused on solving specific workflow problems and measuring whether the solution works.
- Comfort learning tools and frameworks; experience with agent runtimes, model APIs, MCP, tracing, or evaluation tools is helpful.
Navan uses AI-assisted Automated Employment Decision Tool (Metaview) to assist with evaluating resumes against job qualifications for this role. All final decisions are made by human recruiters and hiring managers.
Human oversight: Metaview does not automatically reject candidates or make final hiring decisions. Our recruiters and hiring managers review all outputs and make the final hiring decision regarding every application.
Your rights: If you prefer to have your application reviewed without AI assistance, you may request a human evaluation by entering your email here. Your decision to do so will not affect how your candidacy is evaluated.
Please refer to our Candidate Privacy Notice for more information about our processing of personal data, and your rights.
About the Role
We are building a fleet of specialized AI services that improve high-value human workflows across the company. As a Senior Software Engineer, Core AI, you will design, build, evaluate, and operate production-grade AI services and agents. You will own work end to end—from data and context design through tool use, application logic, evaluation, and production monitoring.
What You'll Do:
- Build specialized AI services: design and implement task-specific services and agents, including data serialization, retrieval, memory where appropriate, tool integrations, and bounded multi-step reasoning.
- Define and evaluate quality: work with partners to make expected behavior explicit, write and maintain evals against representative examples, and use results to measure performance against expectations.
- Improve quality systematically: use evaluation findings, failure analysis, and production feedback to improve context and data, service logic, tools, and model behavior.
- Build for production: integrate tracing, observability, versioning, monitoring, reliability practices, and success metrics into the services you own.
- Run controlled experiments: compare models, data, and implementation approaches using repeatable benchmarks so improvements are attributable and reproducible.
- Partner on architecture: work with AI Architecture, AI Ops, and Platform teams to make services secure, reliable, cost-aware, and deployable at scale.
- Ship iteratively: move quickly from user problem to prototype to production, learning from real workflow outcomes.
What We're Looking For:
- 5+ years of strong software engineering experience delivering production services or products, ideally at senior or staff level.
- Hands-on experience building AI/LLM-powered applications or agents with real users or operational use.
- Experience with evaluation methods for AI behavior: defining expected outcomes, building test sets or evals, tracking regressions, and acting on results.
- A data-first mindset: able to shape retrieval, context, and serialization to give a model the information needed for the task.
- Good judgment about tool use, autonomy, human review, failure handling, privacy, reliability, latency, and cost.
- A product-minded approach focused on solving specific workflow problems and measuring whether the solution works.
- Comfort learning tools and frameworks; experience with agent runtimes, model APIs, MCP, tracing, or evaluation tools is helpful.
Navan uses AI-assisted Automated Employment Decision Tool (Metaview) to assist with evaluating resumes against job qualifications for this role. All final decisions are made by human recruiters and hiring managers.
Human oversight: Metaview does not automatically reject candidates or make final hiring decisions. Our recruiters and hiring managers review all outputs and make the final hiring decision regarding every application.
Your rights: If you prefer to have your application reviewed without AI assistance, you may request a human evaluation by entering your email here. Your decision to do so will not affect how your candidacy is evaluated.
Please refer to our Candidate Privacy Notice for more information about our processing of personal data, and your rights.
See All 30 AI Software Developer Jobs in Palo Alto
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Find AI Software Developer JobsAI Software Developer Job Market in Palo Alto
Who's Hiring
- Tesla14
- Rivian3
- SpaceX3
- Rubrik2
- JPMorganChase2
Top Industries Hiring
- Technology & Software
- Manufacturing
AI Software Developer Jobs in Palo Alto: Frequently Asked Questions
How do I get a ai software developer job in Palo Alto?
The most direct path is targeting Palo Alto's dense cluster of AI-focused startups and established technology firms in Stanford Research Park and along University Avenue. Employers here lean heavily toward candidates with hands-on experience in large language models, machine learning pipelines, or MLOps tooling. A strong GitHub portfolio, contributions to open-source AI projects, and familiarity with the cloud-native stacks common in this market give candidates a clear edge over generalist software developers.
Which companies hire ai software developers in Palo Alto?
Employers hiring ai software developers in Palo Alto right now include Tesla, Rivian, and SpaceX, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of November 2026. Palo Alto's employer mix ranges from venture-backed AI startups building foundation models to mature enterprise technology companies expanding their AI product lines.
Are there remote ai software developer jobs in Palo Alto?
Yes, and ai software developer work is particularly well-suited to remote and hybrid arrangements given its desk-based, code-centric nature. About 31% of ai software developer openings tied to Palo Alto are remote or hybrid as of November 2026, reflecting how broadly distributed AI engineering teams have become. Model training, experimentation, and code review are the tasks Palo Alto employers most commonly allow off-site.
How can I get a ai software developer job in Palo Alto with little or no experience?
The most realistic entry path in Palo Alto is through AI research assistant or junior machine learning engineer roles at university-affiliated labs and early-stage startups near Stanford's campus, where teams are small and scope broad. Employers in this market respond well to independent projects, Kaggle competition results, and published research, even if it is academic. Targeting seed-stage companies along University Avenue also works because they often hire generalists who can grow into AI-specific responsibilities quickly.
Which industries hire the most ai software developers in Palo Alto?
The sectors hiring the most ai software developers in Palo Alto are Technology & Software and Manufacturing, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of November 2026. Palo Alto's proximity to Stanford University and its concentration of venture capital drives outsized AI hiring across these sectors compared to most other California cities.
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See All 30 AI Software Developer Jobs in Palo Alto
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