Staff Software Engineer, AI Platform

About the role

JLL empowers you to shape a brighter way.

Our people at JLL are shaping the future of real estate for a better world by combining world class services, advisory and technology for our clients. We are committed to hiring the best, most talented people and empowering them to thrive, grow meaningful careers and to find a place where they belong. Whether you’ve got deep experience in commercial real estate, skilled trades or technology, or you’re looking to apply your relevant experience to a new industry, join our team as we help shape a brighter way forward.

About the team

We are building JLL's internal AI platform: the layer every team in the firm uses to ship AI agents and AI-backed products. That means a gateway that puts a large and growing set of models from multiple providers behind one API, a shared chat surface that makes any agent reachable by employees across the firm, the developer tooling that takes an agent from an idea to something running in production, etc.

You would join early enough to shape what this platform becomes. The foundations are live and already carrying production traffic, and the decisions still ahead of us are the ones that determine how every team at JLL builds with AI. Few engineers get the chance to set that direction at a firm this size, and fewer still get to see it in use across the business within weeks of building it.

About the role

This is a Staff level individual contributor role on a young platform. You will set technical direction rather than receive it: choosing the abstractions other teams will build against, deciding what belongs in the platform and what does not, and being accountable for whether those choices still look right a year from now.

The work is genuinely both halves of the title. It is serious distributed systems engineering, with a gateway on the critical path of everything the firm builds, and it is AI engineering, where the hard problems are model routing, evaluation, guardrails, token cost and latency. We need someone who has shipped LLM backed systems in production and who would also be a strong platform engineer on any team.

What you'll do

Build the platform

Own significant parts of the platform end to end, from the shape of the API through to how it behaves under load

Be accountable for reliability and performance in production, on a gateway that sits on the critical path of everything the firm builds with AI

Design the model gateway: provider abstraction, routing, failover, and making a provider switch a configuration change rather than a migration

Make the agent surface work regardless of which framework a team chose or where their agent runs

Solve the AI engineering problems

Build the evaluation and benchmarking capability the platform needs, largely from scratch

Design the guardrails that let an agent reach production safely, and help turn draft internal standards into something enforceable in code

Own inference cost and latency as first class engineering concerns, including spend attribution and the routing decisions behind it

Keep pace with a model landscape that changes weekly, and make onboarding a new model routine rather than a project

Set the standard

Make the compliant path the fast path, so that building on the platform is how a team clears architecture, security and responsible-AI review

Be the engineer other teams bring their hardest integration problems to

Raise the bar on observability before scale forces the issue

Mentor across a distributed team, and leave behind designs and documentation that outlast your involvement

What we're looking for

Required

8+ years building and operating production systems

Direct experience shipping agentic systems to production, not prototypes: agentic patterns, retrieval, tool calling, inference cost and latency, etc.

Hands-on experience with more than one model provider, including dealing with the differences between them in practice

Experience with evaluation, observability or guardrail tooling for agentic systems

Strong platform engineering track record, on systems where other engineering teams were your users

Hands-on depth in at least one major public cloud, including running and debugging production workloads

Experience designing APIs and abstractions that others build against and that you then have to keep stable

Demonstrable production ownership: on-call, incident response, root cause analysis

A track record of pushing work through a large organisation: navigating process, winning the argument, and getting decisions unblocked rather than waiting on them

Excellent English communication, written and spoken

Preferred

Built or operated an internal developer platform or shared multi-tenant service

Kubernetes and container-based delivery

Infrastructure as code

Enterprise security, data privacy or responsible-AI review processes

How we work:

A small team that moves quickly inside a very large organisation, where the fastest route is rarely the obvious one

An early stage platform where the roadmap is still being written

Deciding without complete information, and revisiting the decision when it turns out to be wrong

A distributed team with limited timezone overlap

Production users from day one, on a platform still being built underneath them

This position does not provide visa sponsorship. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship.

Estimated compensation for this position:

160,000.00 – 260,000.00 USD per year

This range is an estimate and actual compensation may differ. Final compensation packages are determined by various considerations including but not limited to candidate qualifications, location, market conditions, and internal considerations.

Location:

Remote –Chicago, IL

If this job description resonates with you, we encourage you to apply, even if you don’t meet all the requirements. We’re interested in getting to know you and what you bring to the table!

Personalized benefits that support personal well-being and growth:

JLL recognizes the impact that the workplace can have on your wellness, so we offer a supportive culture and comprehensive benefits package that prioritizes mental, physical and emotional health. Some of these benefits may include:

401(k) plan with matching company contributions

Comprehensive Medical, Dental & Vision Care

Paid parental leave at 100% of salary

Paid Time Off and Company Holidays

Early access to earned wages through Daily Pay

At JLL, we harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to efficiently accelerate meaningful connections between candidates and opportunities. Using AI capabilities, we analyze your application for relevant skills, experiences, and qualifications to generate valuable insights about how your unique profile aligns with the specific requirements of the role you're pursuing.

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