Senior staff software engineer

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Job Summary

The Senior Staff Software Engineer - Agentic AI will design and deliver core agent capabilities, including policy execution, reasoning, orchestration, and failurehandling. They will build productionready agent runtimes-state and memory systems, planners, and toolrouting components-while ensuring safety, reliability, latency, and cost efficiency. This role will contribute to multiagent workflows for classification, routing, reconciliation, anomaly detection, and decisioning. The role includes implementing deterministic paths where needed, integrating graph/RAG memory, and establishing strong observability and evaluation pipelines. You will mentor engineers and help uphold high engineering standards across the team.

Essential Job Functions

• Design and enhance multiagent frameworks and LLMpowered autonomous systems using goal schemas, plannerexecutor patterns, and welldefined policy enforcement points. Contribute to the definition and implementation of agent state and memory architectures (short/longterm, episodic, semantic) with strong PIIminimization practices and appropriate TTL strategies. - (20%)

• Implement and refine ReAct, CoT, and ToT reasoning loops, and help standardize their use across agent workflows. Build offline and online evaluation signals using curated golden datasets. Contribute to defining and implementing agenttoagent communication protocols using frameworks like LangGraph, AutoGen, or CrewAI. - (15%)

• Measure and improve agent decision reliability using tools such as LangSmith, Arize Phoenix, and Weights & Biases. Design deterministic toolchaining patterns with appropriate fallbacks, and implement safeguards including idempotency, retries, and circuitbreaker logic. Contribute to integrating grounding techniques to ensure accurate and reliable agent behavior. - (15%)

• Architect and implement safety controls such as scoped tool access, allow/deny actions, validators, redteam hooks, and humanescalation paths. Use AgentSpec to define and apply Policy Enforcement Points (PEPs) that prevent highrisk or irreversible agent actions. - (15%)

• Operate and scale production agentic AI platforms on Kubernetes by defining agentcentric SLOs, instrumenting deep telemetry (reasoning quality, hallucination rates, tool latency), and supporting oncall through agentassisted triage, automated rollback/rollforward, and humangated controls. - (15%)

• Establish enterprise safety guardrails, ethical guidelines, and compliance standards to ensure agents operate within legal, regulatory, and organizational boundaries, especially in highrisk or financial workflows. - (10%)

• Partner with Product to shape AI strategy and agent user experiences, and collaborate with data and backend teams to ensure agents access highquality, realtime data across SQL systems, CRMs, SaaS platforms, APIs, and event streams within existing architectures. - (5%)

• Communicate complex agentic concepts-such as CoT, RAG, and safety controls-to nontechnical stakeholders to build trust and organizational readiness. Model resilience around model failures and promote AInative engineering practices, including prompt design and evaluation techniques, across teams. - (5%)

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field of study.

• 12+ years of experience in Software Engineering including 2+ years in AI/ML, LLMs, agent-based systems or large-scale distributed systems (e.g., LLM-powered applications, LangChain, LangGraph, AutoGen) and 3+ years of experience implementing IaC (Terraform or Ansible).

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's Degree in Computer Science or related field of study.

• 15+ years of experience in Software Engineering including3+ years of experience in AI/ML, Generative AI, or agentic systems (e.g., LLM-powered applications, LangChain, LangGraph, AutoGen), 4+ years of experience in Fintech/payments integrations; PCI and data protection familiarity and 4+ years of experience in implementing IaC (Terraform or Ansible).

Skills

• Agent Based Modeling

• Amazon Web Services (AWS)

• Datadog

• OpenAI

• Grafana

• Graph Databases

• Large Language Models (LLMs)

• PostgreSQL

• Prometheus (Software)

• New Relic

• Redis

• Telemetry

Reports To : Director and above

Direct Reports : 0

Work Environment

• Normal office environment. (Remote or Hybrid), 3 to 4 days per month are required in office if within 60 miles of a Bread Financial location. On-call rotation to include evenings or weekends.

Physical and Mental Requirements

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential job function satisfactorily and meet the physical, mental and work environment requirements. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable qualified individuals with disabilities to perform essential job functions, absent undue hardship.

• Communicate/Hearing

• Communicate/Talking

• Typing/Writing

Other Duties

This job description is illustrative of the types of duties typically performed by this job. It is not intended to be an exhaustive listing of each and every essential function of the job. Because job content may change from time to time, the Company reserves the right to add and/or delete essential functions from this job at any time.

Salary Range (unless otherwise noted below):

$155,600.00 - $333,300.00

Full Salary Range for position:

California: $178,900.00 - $416,600.00Colorado: $155,600.00 - $349,900.00New York: $171,100.00 - $416,600.00Washington: $163,300.00 - $383,300.00Maryland: $163,300.00 - $366,600.00Washington DC: $178,900.00 - $383,300.00Illinois: $155,600.00 - $366,600.00New Jersey: $178,900.00 - $383,300.00Vermont: $155,600.00 - $333,300.00Ohio: $155,600.00 - $333,300.00

The actual base pay within this range may be dependent upon many factors, which may include, but are not limited to, work location, education, experience, and skills.

Bread Financial offers medical, prescription drug, dental, vision, and other voluntary benefits (including basic and optional life insurance, supplemental medical plans, and short and long-term disability) to eligible associates (regular full-time associates scheduled to work 30 hours per week or more) and their spouses/domestic partners, and child(ren) under the age of 26. New associate elected coverage begins on date of hire (with the exception of disability coverage which has a 6-month waiting period). Six weeks of 100% paid parental leave for eligible parents is available after a 180-day waiting period. Hired associates can immediately enroll in Bread Financial's 401(k) plan.

All associates receive 11 paid holidays. Associates have discretion in managing their time away from work through the Flexible Time Off (FTO) program and may need to notify and receive approval from their manager prior to taking the time off. Associates (except those located in Illinois) receive 80 hours of Paid Sick and Safe Time ("PSST") upon hire and at the beginning of each subsequent calendar year. Illinois associates receive 40 hours of Illinois PSST upon hire and at the beginning of each subsequent calendar year and 40 hours of Illinois Paid Leave upon hire and at the beginning of each subsequent calendar year. Illinois Paid Leave must be used before associates in Illinois will be approved to take FTO.

Hired associates will be able to elect the purchase company stock during offering periods in June and December. You will be eligible for an annual incentive bonus based on individual and company performance.

Click here for more Benefits information.

About Bread Financial

At Bread Financial, you'll have the opportunity to grow your career, give back to your community, and be part of our award-winning culture. We've been consistently recognized as a best place to work nationally and in many markets and we're proud to promote an environment where you feel appreciated, accepted, valued, and fulfilled-both personally and professionally. Bread Financial supports the overall wellness of our associates with a diverse suite of benefits and offers boundless opportunities for career development and non-traditional career progression.

Bread Financial(NYSE: BFH) is a tech-forward financial services company that provides simple, personalized payment, lending and saving solutions to millions of U.S. consumers.Our payment solutions deliver growth for some of the most recognized brands in travel & entertainment, health & beauty, technology, electronics, jewelry, home and specialty apparel through ourco-brand and private label credit cards and pay-over-time products providing choice and value to our shared customers.Additionally, we offer Bread Financial general purpose credit cards and saving products that empower our customers and their passions for a better life.

Bread Financial proudly marks 30 years of success in 2026. To learn more about our global associates, our performance and our sustainability progress,visit breadfinancial.comor follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn.

• Bread Financial offers competitive pay, a comprehensive selection of benefit options including 401(k).

• The Company is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

• Any applicant offered employment will be required to establish that they are legally authorized to work in the United States for the Company.

• The Company participates in E-Verify.

• The Company will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with a criminal history, in a manner consistent with the requirements of all applicable federal, state, and local laws, including the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, and the New York City Fair Chance Act. Applicants with criminal histories are encouraged to apply.

• The Company complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), as amended, and all applicable state/local laws. The Company will provide accommodations to applicants needing accommodations to complete the application process. Applicants with disabilities may contact the Company to request and arrange for accommodations. If you need assistance to accommodate a disability, you may request an accommodation at any time. Please contact the Recruiting Team at [email protected].

Job Family:

Information Technology

Job Type:

Regular