Senior AI Software Engineer Jobs in Houston, TX

Software Engineer - AI Integrations — First Distributors (Houston, TX)

We're a Houston industrial PVF distributor building a platform that intakes customer inquiries and produces structured, priced quotations.

The software is live with our own sales team today and we're building toward agents that can run the full quoting workflow end to end.

You'd be the third engineer on the team, working directly with the CEO. You'll have unusually high ownership over architecture, product direction, and how we solve difficult technical problems.

What you'll work on

• Workflow automation: tool use, multi-step processes, third-party integrations, retries, exception handling, and knowing when software should hand a problem to a human
• Production backend systems: Python/FastAPI services, PostgreSQL data modeling, background jobs, APIs, authentication, observability, and integrations with external systems
• Full-stack delivery: making changes across the backend and our React/TypeScript web application when necessary to ship a complete solution.
• Reliable AI pipelines: combining LLMs, deterministic methods, rules, confidence scoring, validation, retries, and human review rather than treating every problem as a prompt
• Evaluation infrastructure: golden datasets, regression suites, and accuracy metrics we actually trust before shipping a prompt or model change

What we're looking for

• 3+ years of production backend engineering in Python; you write real services, not notebooks
• Hands-on experience shipping LLM-backed features to actual users, prompt design, structured output, function calling, handling non-determinism
• Comfortable in a startup environment: no PM, no QA, no ticket queue. You'll talk to the sales reps yourself and decide what to build
• Strong SQL and data-modeling instincts
• A rigorous approach to reliability: you measure before you optimize and want to know whether a change actually improved the system
• Good judgment about when not to use an LLM and when deterministic code, rules, or traditional algorithms are the better solution
• You measure before you optimize. If you've built or wanted to build an eval harness because you were tired of guessing whether a change helped, you'll fit in well with our team.
• A rigorous approach to reliability. You want to measure whether a change actually improved the system rather than relying on a few good examples.
• Ability to take ownership of an ambiguous problem: investigate it, propose an approach, implement it, test it, deploy it, and iterate based on real user feedback

Especially valuable experience

• Experience working at an early-stage startup or on a small engineering team where you owned major features end to end.

Where is the Role Located

• Houston, TX – near IAH Airport
• Role is on-site with the option to work from home on Fridays

Why this role is different

This isn't an AI demo looking for a use case. The software is already processing real RFQs for a real industrial distributor, and every mistake/win has a potential impact on actual high-dollar purchasing and quoting decisions.

You'll also be joining extremely early. The engineering team is small, and you’ll have direct access to leadership and users.

You won't be joining to own one narrow layer of the stack. We want engineers who can understand the business problem, determine the right technical solution, and carry it all the way into production.

As employee number 3, this role comes with significant upside potential and upward mobility as our vision takes shape and the company grows.

Pay: $100,000.00 - $150,000.00 per year

Benefits:

• Dental insurance
• Health insurance

Application Question(s):

• Why do you believe you would be a good fit for our team?
• What interests you in this position?
• This role is in person near the IAH airport in Houston, TX. Will you be able to work from 8am-5pm on-site?

Work Location: In person