Senior Software Engineer
First American Financial· Financial Services· Sep 16, 2026 · 1mo ago
USA, California, Santa Ana
Remote
Full-time
Senior
$129K–$172K
5+ years exp
Job description
Who We Are Join a team that puts its People First! Since 1889, First American (NYSE: FAF) has held an unwavering belief in its people. They are passionate about what they do, and we are equally passionate about fostering an environment where all feel welcome, supported, and empowered to be innovative and reach their full potential. Our inclusive, people-first culture has earned our company numerous accolades, including being named to the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For® list for eleven consecutive years. We have also earned awards as a best place to work for women, diversity and LGBTQ+ employees, and have been included on more than 50 regional best places to work lists. First American will always strive to be a great place to work, for all. For more information, please visit www.careers.firstam.com.
What We Do Remote Work Welcome
Be part of a transformative team that is shaping the way First American builds and delivers world-class technology products that fuel the real estate industry. We are looking for forward-thinking engineers who will envision, design, build, and deploy AI-native systems - from concept to production - that provide exceptional experiences and lasting value to our customers.
First American is seeking software engineering candidates to grow our team. An ideal candidate combines strong software engineering fundamentals with hands-on experience deploying LLMs and agentic systems into production. As a Senior Software Engineer, you will lead projects as part of a small, focused engineering delivery team, building intelligent, reliable software that drives meaningful business outcomes. You will be part of a transformative team whose mission is to modernize our core Title & Settlement Platform using modern architectures, cloud-native services, and production AI systems.
What You ll Do: Build & Deploy AI Systems (0 → 1): You will own the full lifecycle of LLM-powered features - from early prototyping and prompt design through production deployment, monitoring, and iteration. This includes fine-tuning workflows, building evaluation harnesses, and inference infrastructure that serve real users at scale. You will make pragmatic decisions and ship AI capabilities that are reliable, cost-effective, and measurably valuable.
Agentic Systems Development: Design and implement autonomous agent architectures that reason, plan, use tools, and execute multi-step tasks with minimal human intervention. You will build orchestration layers, memory systems, guardrails, and feedback loops that enable agents to operate safely and effectively within business workflows. You will define agent behaviors, constraints, and failure modes - ensuring systems degrade gracefully and remain explainable.
Code: You will be an active contributor to the codebase, designing, developing, testing, and deploying code supporting our most complex functional areas. Using agentic development, you will architect and implement modern services that are scalable, highly available, and fault-tolerant. You will build backend services and APIs that enable secure, reliable interaction between AI agents and internal or external systems. First American embraces AI as a core tool in our development process. You will use AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot) as part of your daily workflow, and help establish team-wide practices for agentic authoring - including prompt patterns, context management, and quality gates that maximize engineering velocity while maintaining code quality.
Collaborate / Partner: Collaborate closely with product management, solution architects, AI/ML practitioners, and cross-functional teams to iteratively design, develop, and validate outcome-driven solutions. You will translate ambiguous business problems into well-scoped solutions, helping stakeholders understand what s feasible, what s risky, and what delivers the highest value.
Operational Excellence: Implement solutions that are high quality, secure, observable, and production-ready. Establish evaluation strategies, cost monitoring, latency budgets, and guardrails that ensure AI systems behave reliably in production. Contribute to reviews of designs, code, artifacts, and metrics with a focus on both system performance and LLM usage efficiency.
Continuous Improvement: Join a team determined to achieve ambitious goals by providing regular feedback, mentoring peers, and driving continuous improvement. Advocate for modern engineering practices that improve development velocity, system robustness, and long-term quality.
What You ll Bring: 5 years of experience as a software engineer building production-grade systems
Demonstrated experience taking LLM-powered features from prototype to production (0 → 1), including prompt engineering, evaluation, deployment, and iteration
Hands-on experience building agentic systems - including planning/reasoning loops, tool use, memory/context management, and orchestration
Strong experience building large-scale, back-end services and APIs using modern languages and frameworks
Experience using AI-assisted development tools (Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or similar) as part of a modern software engineering workflow
Solid understanding of LLM operational concerns: token economics, latency optimization, model routing, caching strategies, and cost management at scale
Experience designing evaluation frameworks and quality metrics for AI systems (accuracy, hallucination rates, task completion, regression testing)
Strong understanding of software engineering principles, cloud-native infrastructure, and distributed system design
Ability to build robust, scalable, reusable solutions that safely integrate AI capabilities into core platforms
Ability to mentor and influence other engineers, sharing knowledge and raising overall technical quality
Ability to unblock yourself and help accelerate the team in achieving complex, cross-disciplinary goals
Outcome-oriented mindset, using metrics and data to evaluate both system behavior and development effectiveness
Experience driving engineering best practices for high-functioning teams through effective use of tools and automation
Familiarity with deployment and observability strategies that support continuous delivery and high availability
Pay Range: $129,300.00 - $172,300.00 Annually
This hiring range is a reasonable estimate of the base pay range for this position at the time of posting. Pay is based on a number of factors which may include job-related knowledge, skills, experience, business requirements and geographic location.
** Note that the following statements only apply to candidates who will be working from an unincorporated area within Los Angeles County. **
First American will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with arrest or conviction records, in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable state and local laws (e.g., the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act).
First American intends to conduct a review of an applicant’s criminal history in connection with a conditional offer. First American reasonably believes that a criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following material job duties for this position potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment: handling of confidential, proprietary or trade secret information belonging to First American or its customers, administrating or facilitating financial transactions, and the ability to meet customer-imposed criminal history requirements.
What We Offer By choice, we don’t simply accept individuality – we embrace it, we support it, and we thrive on it! Our People First culture is inclusive for all employees - not just because it's the right thing to do, but because it's the key to our success. We are proud to foster an authentic and inclusive workplace For All. You are free and encouraged to bring your entire, unique self to work. First American is an equal opportunity employer in every sense of the term.
Based on eligibility, First American offers a comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, vision, 401k, PTO/paid sick leave and other great benefits like an employee stock purchase plan.
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Benefits
Benefits detected in the listing.
Dental
Vision
401k
Pto