Staff Software Engineer

ABOUT TEKION

Positively disrupting an industry that has not seen any innovation in over 50 years, Tekion has challenged the paradigm with the first and fastest cloud-native automotive platform that includes the revolutionary Automotive Retail Cloud (ARC) for retailers, Automotive Enterprise Cloud (AEC) for manufacturers and other large automotive enterprises and Automotive Partner Cloud (APC) for technology and industry partners. Tekion connects the entire spectrum of the automotive retail ecosystem through one seamless platform. The transformative platform uses cutting-edge technology, big data, machine learning, and AI to seamlessly bring together OEMs, retailers/dealers and consumers. With its highly configurable integration and greater customer engagement capabilities, Tekion is enabling the best automotive retail experiences ever. Tekion employs close to 3,000 people across North America, Asia and Europe.

Key Responsibilities

• Tekion is looking for talented Staff Software Engineers who want to be part of building next-gen AI-native business applications on the cloud.
• You will use your passion and expertise for creating world-class AI platform products. You should excel in working with large-scale applications and frameworks and have outstanding communication and leadership skills.
• Lead the technical vision and architecture for Tekion's AI Native Platform — the foundational layer powering AI capabilities across all Tekion products.
• Architect and build Tekion's AI gateway — a highly available, multi-provider LLM abstraction layer.
• Lead the design of Tekion's MCP (Model Context Protocol) ecosystem.
• Design and implement agentic AI frameworks Drive AI platform reliability and observability.
• Provide technical mentorship and set engineering standards for the AI Native Platform team.
• Take end-to-end ownership of platform architecture decisions and be responsible for their success in production.
• Collaborate with product, AI/ML research, and domain engineering teams to define the AI platform roadmap Deliver with quality, on time, in a fast-paced start-up environment.

Skills & Qualifications

• Bachelor/master’s in computer science or relevant fields
• 9+ years of relevant software engineering experience
• Strong sense of ownership and technical leadership
• Excellent Java and object-oriented development skills Deep experience in building and scaling microservices Strong problem-solving skills, technical troubleshooting, and diagnosing
• Expected to be a role model for engineers, enforce high code quality, and drive engineering excellence within the team
• Experience in developing backends for enterprise systems (eCommerce / manufacturing / supply chain, etc.) Excellent understanding of debugging, performance, and optimization techniques
• Experience with Java, MongoDB, MySQL, AWS technologies, ELK stack, Spring Boot, Kafka Deep experience in cloud technologies and large-scale distributed systems
• Deep expertise in LLM systems — model selection and evaluation, token economics at scale, context window optimization
• Strong knowledge of MCP (Model Context Protocol) and tool-use standards — designing MCP ecosystems, tool schema governance, auth and trust models for MCP servers, and integration with multi-agent frameworks
• Experience designing AI gateways / LLM infrastructure Experience with agentic AI architectures — multi-agent systems, planning/reasoning frameworks (ReAct, Plan-and-Execute), tool orchestration, guardrails and safety layers, human-in-the-loop escalation, and agent evaluation
• Proficiency in LLM observability and MLOps Experience with AI safety, governance, and responsible AI patterns Demonstrated ability to deliver in a fast-paced environment Excellent communication and leadership skills

Current Tekion Employees: Please apply via the Internal Job Board in Ashby.

Note: Tekion recently transitioned to a new recruiting tool and we appreciate your patience and feedback as we adjust to our new system!

For more information on our privacy practices, please refer to our Applicant Privacy Notice here https://tekion.com/legal/privacy/applicant-and-candidate-privacy-notice.

Important: Tekion will only contact candidates from an @tekion.com http://tekion.com email address or through our applicant tracking system (no-reply@ashbyhq.com). We may also work with authorized recruiting partners from time to time. Tekion and its recruiting partners will never ask you to pay fees or send money for applications, interviews, training, or onboarding. If you receive a message that seems suspicious, please do not respond or share personal or financial information.