Senior Staff Engineer & AI Innovation Lead (Elixir, Ruby, Flutter)

What Success Looks Like

One year in, this person will have absorbed our last Staff Engineer's departure without a drop in client delivery, replaced ad hoc AI tool usage with a documented AI skill enhancement strategy that's measurably adopted across every project team, and become the person Staff Engineers and developers point to when asked who owns SmartLogic's technical standards and direction.

Description

SmartLogic is hiring a Senior Staff Engineer & AI Innovation Lead.  This role serves as a senior technical leader who owns the health and direction of SmartLogic’s engineering organization while remaining hands-on as a Staff Engineer (SE) on client project work. This is a new, blended role: part of your time is spent setting technical standards, driving AI-enabled development practices, and coaching our engineering team; the rest is spent in the project leadership seat with clients and code.

SmartLogic is a custom software development agency, with client work organized by project. Each project is staffed with a Project Manager, an SE, Designers, and Developers. As the project’s SE, you'll own planning and implementation of technical delivery, maintain product documentation, maintain the project backlog, and technical direction, and co-lead in partnership with your Project Manager.

As AI Innovation Lead & Technical Leader, you'll operate at the organization-wide level.  This role will: set the technical standards other SEs are expected to follow, own how we adopt AI tooling across SmartLogic, and provide technical guidance to staff. Note: this is not a direct-manager role, the COO remains responsible for supervision and for resourcing and staffing decisions and you will not have direct reports for HR/supervision purposes, but you will be the credible technical voice.

This position is fully remote within the United States and its Territories. In this role, you will report to the COO. Even if you don’t think you meet 100% of the requirements, but you think this is an interesting role that you can succeed in, please still apply.

About SmartLogic

SmartLogic is an experienced and growing custom software development consultancy successfully serving clients since 2005. We are deeply committed to our team, our clients, and the communities where we work. Some of our recent company initiatives include leading on youth workforce development, mentoring undergraduates, partner in UMD Launch Fund Nexus program with startups and graduate students, software developer apprenticeships, our Elixir Wizards podcast, and the Baltimore Women in Tech micro-grants program. SmartLogic values both continuous growth and giving back to the community, so there may be opportunities to engage at the professional level through conferences and our podcast.

First 100 Days

Days 1 to 30

1. Fully onboard onto the active client projects coming off our departing Staff Engineer, with zero missed commitments during the handoff.
2. Independently own technical direction, PRD/backlog, and code review cadence on at least two of those projects by day 30.

Days 31 to 60

1. Start structured, recurring technical 1:1s with engineering team members, distinct from day-to-day project mentorship.
2. Begin to map current AI tool usage, standards gaps, and delivery pain points.
3. Lead technical operations meetings and owns decisions made regarding technical standards, skill gaps, and tooling choices. 

Days 61 to 90

1. Draft a first-pass AI skill enhancement strategy: current state, target state, and a rough rollout plan.
2. Present an engineering health and AI implementation assessment and 6 to 12 month roadmap to the COO

Days 91 to 100 and beyond

1. Review progress against the first 90 days' priorities with the COO.
2. Pilot the AI skill enhancement strategy with at least one project team and collect real feedback, not just intent.
3. Socialize technical standards across all Staff Engineers and project teams.
4. Establish the highest-value technical leadership, engineering modernization, and AI capability priorities for the next 6 to 12 months.

Responsibilities: AI Innovation Specialist & Technical Leader

1. Own the technical health and direction of SmartLogic's engineering organization: set standards, identify gaps, and drive the changes needed to keep our delivery model competitive.
2. Lead company-wide AI adoption: develop and maintain a documented AI skill enhancement strategy, evaluate new tools and practices, and coach the team to use AI to improve speed and quality without sacrificing sound engineering, backed by a way to measure adoption, not just your own usage.
3. Assist with technical 1:1s and the technical direction of the company, in partnership with the COO, distinct from day-to-day project mentorship.
4. Own sales architecture: bring consistency to how Staff Engineers approach quoting, estimating, and solution architecture across prospects and clients.
5. Provide hands-on leadership for CI/CD pipelines, deployment strategies, environment configuration, observability, and production operations across projects.
6. Design, review, and support scalable, secure cloud and server architectures (primarily AWS and Azure).
7. Work closely with the COO, Operations Manager, and Project Managers to communicate project progress, challenges, and resourcing needs, without owning resourcing decisions yourself.

Responsibilities: Staff Engineer & IC

1. Co-lead delivery projects in partnership with the Project Manager to deliver on budget and on time.
2. Support teams of 2 to 6 developers, designers, and QA analysts of varying skill levels, providing guidance to ensure delivery on project commitments.
3. Work closely with Project Managers to maintain the Product Requirements Document, Backlog, and technical direction on your assigned projects, and to plan sprints aligned to scope.
4. Partner with sales and consulting leadership on technical discovery, solution architecture, and rough-order-of-magnitude estimates that are timely and defensible.
5. Serve as the technical expert on assigned projects, including QA and PR review.

Requirements

1. 8+ years of experience with modern software development practices and technologies, building custom software for a variety of clients, including demonstrated technical leadership through architecture, mentoring, and influencing engineering practices without relying on direct management authority.
2. 7+ years of experience with Ruby on Rails, Elixir, and Phoenix; experience with Flutter and/or React Native is strongly preferred.
3. 5+ years of experience with DevOps practices including CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, monitoring, deployment, and tooling (e.g., Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD pipelines, cloud monitoring).
4. 3+ years in a consultancy, not solely product-based companies.
5. Advanced, hands-on experience using modern AI-assisted development tools and agentic coding workflows inside a real production codebase, not limited to prototyping or personal projects, to accelerate code generation, refactoring, testing, debugging, codebase exploration, documentation, and prototyping.
6. Demonstrated ability to use AI responsibly in production software development: validating AI-generated code, maintaining testing and review standards, managing context effectively, and recognizing security, privacy, and quality risks, including knowing when AI assistance should be avoided.
7. Experience evaluating AI tools and practices, establishing repeatable team workflows, standards, or reusable internal tooling/playbooks that other engineers actually use, not just your own workflow, and coaching other engineers in effective AI usage.
8. Experience measuring where AI adoption improves delivery speed or engineering quality, and adjusting practice based on that data rather than anecdote.
9. Experience participating in technical discovery, solution design, and estimation for client-facing and sales prospect projects, with the judgment to bring consistency to how a team estimates and scopes.
10. A track record of coaching or developing other engineers, and comfort setting technical standards that other senior engineers are expected to follow.
11. Be organized, thoughtful, and intentional about the process, demonstrated by an ability to set and manage expectations across teammates, project managers, and leadership alike.

Benefits

The base compensation range for this position is $150k to $187k per year, with an expectation of 50 to 60% billable utilization. We offer health, dental, vision, life, and AD&D insurance, unlimited PTO and STO, paid parental leave, and a 3% matching SIMPLE IRA program.

We are continuously working to cultivate a supportive and inclusive workplace that recognizes and respects diversity of background, experience, and thought. We believe that diversity benefits both our company culture and the software we write.

SmartLogic is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy and gender identity), national origin, political affiliation, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, genetic information, age, membership in an employee organization, retaliation, parental status, military service, or other non-merit factor.

No phone calls or unsolicited emails, please. We do not work with recruiters or placement agencies.

SmartLogic is committed to professional development and community involvement. We provide ample opportunity for learning through dedicated professional development days, participation in conferences, and company-supplied access to books and other resources. We organize events, meetups, and invest in our local and online communities.