Software Engineer AI Jobs in Palo Alto, CA
Software Engineer AI jobs in Palo Alto are in strong demand, concentrated in the Stanford Research Park, downtown University Avenue corridor, and the California Avenue district, across enterprise AI infrastructure, developer tools, and foundation model research. Leading employers right now include Tesla, Rivian, and SpaceX. See the openings below and apply to the ones that match your experience.
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Showing 5 of 30+ Software Engineer AI jobs
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 Software Engineer AI Jobs in Palo Alto
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Find Software Engineer AI JobsSoftware Engineer AI Job Market in Palo Alto
Who's Hiring
- Tesla14
- Rivian3
- SpaceX3
- Rubrik2
- JPMorganChase2
Top Industries Hiring
- Technology & Software
- Manufacturing
Software Engineer AI Jobs in Palo Alto: Frequently Asked Questions
How do I get a software engineer ai job in Palo Alto?
Focus on employers in Palo Alto's AI infrastructure, developer tooling, and applied research sectors, which cluster in Stanford Research Park and along the California Avenue and University Avenue corridors. Hands-on experience with large language model fine-tuning, ML pipelines, or reinforcement learning from human feedback gives candidates a clear edge here. Targeting early-stage AI labs and deep-tech spinouts in addition to established names broadens your options considerably in this market.
Which companies hire software engineer ais in Palo Alto?
Employers hiring software engineer ais in Palo Alto right now include Tesla, Rivian, and SpaceX, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of November 2026. Palo Alto's hiring landscape skews toward AI-native startups, research-focused labs, and enterprise software companies with dedicated AI product divisions, many of them anchored in the Stanford Research Park ecosystem.
Are there remote software engineer ai jobs in Palo Alto?
Yes, though availability depends on the role type, with fully remote options more common for model evaluation, prompt engineering, and backend ML work than for on-site research or hardware-adjacent AI positions. About 31% of software engineer ai openings tied to Palo Alto are remote or hybrid as of November 2026, reflecting the desk-heavy nature of much of this work. Training infrastructure and inference optimization roles posted by Palo Alto employers tend to be the most remote-accessible.
How can I get a software engineer ai job in Palo Alto with little or no experience?
The most realistic entry path in Palo Alto is through AI tooling or developer-platform startups, which regularly hire junior engineers willing to work across the full stack in early-stage environments. Roles such as ML data associate, AI quality analyst, or junior inference engineer at Palo Alto research labs and YC-backed companies serve as common on-ramps. Contributing to open-source AI projects and completing coursework tied to Stanford's online AI programs signals seriousness to local hiring managers who value demonstrated initiative over credentials alone.
Which industries hire the most software engineer ais in Palo Alto?
Palo Alto software engineer ai roles concentrate in Technology & Software and Manufacturing, based on current listings on Migrate Mate as of November 2026. Palo Alto's proximity to Stanford University and its long history as a hub for venture-backed deep-tech companies drives particularly dense hiring across these sectors compared to most other California markets.
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