Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. PrizePicks is a fast-growing Daily Fantasy Sports company building sports-focused digital experiences. The Senior Software Engineer, Applied AI will build agent platforms and internal tooling, operationalize AI across the software development lifecycle, and ship reliable AI-powered capabilities from prototype through production. The role also involves diagnosing AI adoption challenges, establishing engineering standards, and mentoring other engineers.
Responsibilities
- Design and implement primitives like orchestration, tool/function calling, evaluation harnesses, prompt/version management, tracing/observability, and safety/guardrails
- Support patterns like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), structured extraction, and production inference workflows
- Work with application engineering teams to embed AI into day-to-day engineering workflows (code review assist, test generation, incident support, developer copilots), with clear quality gates and measurable impact
- Own the judgment call of what to delegate to agents vs. keep as human work — scope tasks so agents are set up to succeed, and adapt that boundary as team skill levels and tooling maturity vary
- Given an agent run, diagnose whether it did its job well from the trace itself — not just the final diff. Debug agent behavior the way you'd debug a distributed system: inputs, intermediate steps, failure points
- Treat AI output as a claim to verify, not a result to trust — including tests the agent writes for its own code
- Own projects from prototype → production: data needs, system design, model/vendor selection, rollout plans, monitoring, and iteration
- Partner closely with product, design, and data/ML stakeholders to deliver customer-facing outcomes (not just demos)
- Assess where AI adoption is working and where it isn't — identify bottlenecks and failure modes across teams, not just within your own code
- Build what's missing, teach what's already built, and make the case for adoption to skeptical or hesitant engineers
- Establish best practices for reliability, evaluation, incident response, privacy/security, and "how we build AI here."
- Coach other engineers through design reviews, pairing, and pragmatic technical leadership — including how to critically review AI-generated code rather than rubber-stamp it
Skills
- 6+ years of professional software engineering experience (or equivalent), including shipping production systems
- Direct experience on an Applied AI / product AI team building LLM- or ML-powered features (agents/tooling strongly preferred)
- Demonstrated judgment in agent-driven development: knowing what to delegate, how to scope/context an agent, and how to verify its output before trusting it — this is as much a hiring bar here as raw coding ability
- Strong backend/system design skills: APIs, distributed systems, queues/workflows, observability, and performance
- Comfort navigating ambiguity and driving outcomes with cross-functional partners (product, design, data/ML, platform)
- Track record of mentoring peers and leveling up engineering quality — including helping others build critical judgment around AI-assisted output, not just AI literacy
- While we prefer candidates based in Atlanta, we are open to qualified applicants from anywhere in the U.S. and are willing to consider remote candidates
- You must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time
- Direct experience on an Applied AI / product AI team building LLM- or ML-powered features (agents/tooling strongly preferred)
- Experience building "platform" capabilities for other engineers (SDKs, internal frameworks, developer tooling)
- Practical experience with embeddings, search/retrieval, evaluation methodologies, and model monitoring (offline + online)
- Experience building AI-powered tooling/products like agents and assistants at scale
- Familiarity with inference constraints (latency, cost, caching), vendor/model tradeoffs, and deployment patterns
Benefits
- Company-subsidized medical, dental, & vision plans
- 401(k) plan with company match
- Annual bonus
- Flexible PTO to encourage a healthy work/life balance (2 weeks STRONGLY encouraged!)
- Generous paid leave programs, including 16-week paid parental leave and disability benefits
- Workplace flexibility and modern work schedules focused on getting the job done, not hours clocked
- Company-wide in-person events and team outings
- Lifestyle enhancement program
- Company equipment provided (Windows & Mac options)
- Annual performance reviews with opportunities for growth and career development
Company Overview