Staff Software Engineer, Agentic Ads

Location: Foster City, CA Workplace: Hybrid Replit is the agentic software creation platform that enables anyone to build applications using natural language. With millions of users worldwide, Replit is democratizing software development by removing traditional barriers to application creation. ABOUT THE ROLE: Help turn “I built a business” into “I have customers.” As a Staff Software Engineer on Replit’s Money team, you’ll help shape Agentic Ads: an emerging area focused on using AI to make customer acquisition more accessible to businesses built on Replit.   This role focuses on intelligent, advertiser-facing software—not ad-serving infrastructure, an ad exchange, or a real-time bidding engine. You’ll tackle problems at the intersection of AI, business growth, measurement, and trustworthy automation, turning complex decisions into clear, useful experiences.   You’ll help define a new product area, working closely with product, design, and engineering to discover customer needs and deliver practical solutions. This is a hands-on Staff role: you’ll own architecture, lead delivery across teams, mentor engineers, and turn an ambitious vision into incremental customer value. YOU WILL: - Set technical direction for Agentic Ads, translating customer needs into an architecture and roadmap that balance rapid learning with long-term reliability. - Build agent-powered experiences that help businesses make informed growth decisions, translating user goals into understandable recommendations and appropriately authorized actions. - Design extensible integrations with external services, using well-defined APIs and abstractions that accommodate changing provider capabilities and requirements. - Partner with product and data teams to establish reliable measurement, connect product activity to business outcomes, and address data quality, delayed feedback, and uncertainty. - Develop intelligent automation that learns from performance signals and helps users improve outcomes within their goals and constraints. - Make financial control a product requirement: scoped authorization, explicit approvals, budget limits, auditable decisions, clear reporting, and reliable pause controls. Distinguish recommendations from actions that commit customer spend. - Make cross-platform workflows reliable with durable state, idempotency, safe retries, reconciliation, observability, and recovery from partial failures, expired credentials, rate limits, and provider API changes. - Establish agent evaluations and production monitoring for plan quality, tool selection, policy compliance, spend safety, and verified execution. Partner on experiments that distinguish attributed results from incremental customer value. - Lead ambiguous initiatives across product, design, AI, data, security, and partnerships. Stay hands-on with implementation, define incremental milestones, mentor engineers, and own the quality and operation of what the team ships. REQUIRED SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE: - A track record of Staff-level technical leadership on complex customer-facing products or platforms: setting direction, resolving ambiguity, and delivering through launch and production operation across multiple teams. - Strong hands-on software engineering and system design skills across APIs, data modeling, distributed systems, asynchronous workflows, and customer-facing product experiences. - Experience building and operating third-party integrations that remain correct under duplicate requests, partial failures, rate limits, changing schemas, and inconsistent external state. - Practical experience shipping LLM-powered products or agentic workflows, including tool use, orchestration, evaluations, and safeguards for actions taken against external systems. - Strong data and measurement judgment: experience using instrumentation and experiments to evaluate product outcomes, and the ability to reason about noisy data, delayed feedback, uncertainty, and correlation versus causation. - Sound judgment around systems that act on a user’s behalf, including authentication, authorization, sensitive data, approval boundaries, and limits on consequential actions. - Demonstrated ability to align cross-functional teams, explain technical trade-offs, mentor engineers, and drive execution without relying on reporting authority. - A product-minded approach to simplifying complex workflows for non-experts, with hands-on ownership from prototype through reliable production operation. PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS - Experience building advertiser-facing products, marketing automation, campaign-management tools, growth platforms, or software that helps businesses acquire customers. - Experience integrating advertising or marketing APIs; familiarity with account onboarding, campaign lifecycles, and platform requirements. - Working knowledge of conversion tracking, attribution, customer acquisition cost, return on ad spend, budget pacing, and the limits of optimizing with low conversion volume. - Experience with experimentation, incrementality measurement, constrained optimization, recommendation systems, or decision-making under uncertainty. - Experience building permissioned, multi-tenant products with approval workflows, budget controls, audit trails, and privacy-aware handling of customer and conversion data.   BONUS POINTS: - Experience with agent tooling, durable workflow execution, delegated authorization, or evaluation frameworks for agents that take consequential actions. - Experience connecting application events or server-side conversion signals to advertising platforms, or integrating creative generation and landing-page experimentation into growth workflows. - Experience building for small businesses or first-time advertisers, where clear guidance, limited budgets, and sparse data shape the product. - These are additional strengths, not a checklist. Experience with every ad platform is not expected; ad-serving infrastructure experience and an ML research background are not prerequisites. WHAT WE VALUE: - Customer outcomes: success means helping a business acquire qualified leads and customers—not merely connecting an account, launching a campaign, or increasing spend. - User control and trust: agents explain recommendations, act within explicit authority, and make budgets, costs, and consequential changes understandable. - Evidence over activity: we validate measurement, acknowledge uncertainty, and test whether a change improves business outcomes rather than treating attribution as proof of causality. - End-to-end ownership: we own the journey from a business goal through campaign execution, measurement, and ongoing improvement. - Pragmatic technical leadership: we build on existing ad platforms, ship focused increments, and invest in correctness and extensibility where they matter. - Clear collaboration: we document decisions, surface risks early, and help other teams and partners succeed. Full-Time Employee Benefits Include: 💰 Competitive Salary & Equity 💹 401(k) Program with a 4% match (US Only) ⚕️ Health, Dental, Vision and Life Insurance 🩼 Short Term and Long Term Disability 🚼 Paid Parental, Medical, Caregiver Leave 🏝 Flexible Time Off (FTO) + Holidays 🚗 Commuter Benefits (In-Office & US Only) 📱 Monthly Wellness Stipend 🧑‍💻 Autonomous Work Environment 🖥 In Office Set-Up Reimbursement (In-Office Only) 🚀 Quarterly Team Gatherings ☕ In Office Amenities (In-Office Only) Want to learn more about what we are up to? - Self-driving Company https://replit.com/blog/self-driving-company - Replit Agent at Scale https://replit.com/blog/evaluating-and-improving-agent-at-scale - AI Adoption https://replit.com/blog/ai-adoption - Build Open-Source Apps https://replit.com/build/open-source-app-builder   Interviewing + Culture at Replit - Operating Principles https://blog.replit.com/operating-principles - Reasons not to work at Replit https://blog.replit.com/reasons-not-to-join-replit To achieve our mission of making programming more accessible around the world, we need our team to be representative of the world. We welcome your unique perspective and experiences in shaping this product. We encourage people from all kinds of backgrounds to apply, including and especially candidates from underrepresented and non-traditional backgrounds.