Software Engineer (AI)

Pendo spent a decade helping companies understand how people use their software. Agents are the next surface, and this team builds the product for it: customers install Pendo on their own agentic systems, including MCP servers, agent frameworks, and copilots, and Pendo shows them what those agents are actually doing. The team helps customers understand which tools get called, where calls fail, where a contract confuses the model, and what to fix next.

As an AI Software Engineer, you will own features end to end across the service, interface, and the seam between them. You will work across Go services, Vue interfaces, install experiences, instrumentation, telemetry, and LLM-backed product capabilities. You will start with well-shaped problems and take on progressively more ambiguous work as you build context, writing code others can operate and raising issues early when a spec does not match reality.

This role is based in our New York City office.

• Full-stack feature delivery: Ship full-stack features end to end across Go services and Vue interfaces. You will work across backend and frontend boundaries to build product experiences that are reliable, usable, and ready for production.
• Customer install and instrumentation: Build the install and instrumentation experience customers drop into their own agentic systems. Your work should be quick to adopt, hard to get wrong, and light enough to run in production.
• Agent behavior visibility: Capture agent behavior and make it legible for customers. You will help expose tool calls, failures, latency, and the places where a model and a tool contract talk past each other.
• LLM-backed product development: Work on LLM-backed features including prompt and context design, tool calling, evaluation, and related failure modes. You will use hands-on judgment from building with models to improve how customers debug and understand agent behavior.
• Safe, incremental shipping: Ship in small increments behind feature flags and test to the level of product and technical risk. You will use tools such as Jest and Cypress while accounting for non-deterministic model output.
• Production ownership: Own what you ship in production through logging, monitoring, fast resolution, and follow-up work that reduces recurrence. You will write code others can operate and support.
• AI-enabled workflow: Use AI tools as a normal part of your development workflow while staying accountable for what ships. You will bring curiosity and discipline to how AI improves your speed, quality, and judgment.
• Team collaboration: Give useful code reviews, write documentation that survives your absence, and provide reasonable estimates for well-scoped work. You will communicate clearly when work affects other systems or people.

Beyond the qualifications, we hire through a specific lens. These aren't buzzwords; they're the things we'll actually look for in how you talk about your work.

You're a builder, not a maintainer.

You're most energized when there isn't a clear path yet, and you get to define it. You don't wait for direction; you identify gaps, shape solutions, and drive them forward. At Pendo, great Software Engineers don't just follow instructions; they operate as strategic advisors, influencing decisions, guiding stakeholders, and elevating how we work.

You're AI-curious - genuinely.

You're not using AI tools occasionally. You're rewiring how you work around them. You're faster, sharper, and more prolific because of it, and you bring that energy to everything — how you approach your work, how you prep, how you communicate, how you think. We want someone who sees AI as a multiplier, not a shortcut.

• 3+ years of experience shipping full-stack features to production in a SaaS environment.
• Strong proficiency in at least one backend language such as Go, Java, Python, or C++, and one modern frontend framework such as Vue, React, or Angular.
• Experience designing APIs and building services on AWS or GCP against SQL databases.
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs, including API integration, prompt and context design, or tool calling. Professional or substantial personal work is acceptable, with evidence that you have built something and learned where it breaks.
• Experience with Agent frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph), LLM evaluation tooling
• Ability to write unit, integration, and end-to-end tests based on risk, with comfort using safe rollout patterns such as feature flags and canary releases.
• Demonstrated ability to take a well-scoped problem to production independently.
• Active use of AI tools in your development workflow.
• Strong written communication skills and a BS in Computer Science or equivalent experience.

• Experience building or operating an MCP server or comparable agent tooling.
• Experience shipping SDKs or instrumentation libraries that customers install into their own systems, including the versioning and overhead discipline that work requires.
• Experience with analytics or observability products that turn a high volume of events into something a person can act on.
• Vue or data visualization tools such as Highcharts or D3.

Pendo was founded in 2013 by former product managers, who combined their heads and hearts to build something they wanted but never had as product managers: a simple way to understand and attack what truly drives product success. Our mission is to improve society's experience with software. Come join one of the fastest-growing startups, supported by best-in-class institutions like Battery Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Spark Capital and Meritech.

Pendo Core Values: Bias to Act, Hone Your Craft, The Team is Pendo, and Maniacal Focus.

Location: Pendo is a hybrid culture. In-office 3 days per week unless designated remote.

Compensation: The expected base salary range for this role to be performed in New York, NY is $148,000 - $178,000.

Benefits: United States benefits include highly competitive, employer-heavy coverage including $0 premium options, strong 401(k) match, equity, and flexible time off.

EEOC: We are an equal opportunity employer and believe having diverse teams where everyone brings their whole self to Pendo is key to our success. We welcome all people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives.

Accessibility: Pendo is committed to working with, and providing access and reasonable accommodation to, applicants with mental and/or physical disabilities. If you think you may require an accommodation for any part of the recruitment process, please send a request to: [email protected]. All requests for accommodations are treated discreetly and confidentially, as practical and permitted by law.