Senior Software Engineer, Self-Serve Intelligence

At Lyft, our purpose is to serve and connect. We aim to achieve this by cultivating a work environment where all team members belong and have the opportunity to thrive.

Every day, millions of riders and drivers depend on Lyft — and when something goes wrong, we want to make it right as fast as possible. The Self-Serve Intelligence team within Safety & Customer Care org is building the AI-powered systems that do exactly that: resolving rider and driver suboptimal experiences without agent involvement through intelligent solutions in AI Assist (e.g. AI Agents), automations, and self-serve workflows. We're building backend systems, APIs, and AI-powered products that fundamentally rethink how customers get help — combining robust engineering with GenAI to deliver reliable, scalable self-serve experiences.

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Self-Serve Intelligence team, you will design, build, ship, and maintain backend services and AI-powered products (e.g. various AI Agents) that autonomously resolve customer suboptimal experiences. You'll own the full lifecycle — from system design and prototyping through production deployment and operational excellence — partnering with product, design, data science, and operations to deliver high-quality, reliable solutions at scale.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, ship, and maintain scalable backend services and GenAI-powered products (e.g. AI Agents) that resolve rider and driver suboptimal experiences autonomously
• Develop robust evaluation frameworks to measure and improve the quality and impact of GenAI-driven customer experiences
• Lead projects from idea to production, owning end-to-end system design, implementation, and operational health
• Write well-crafted, well-tested, readable, maintainable code
• Design and evolve APIs, data models, and service architectures that support rapid product iteration
• Rapidly adopt and integrate emerging AI capabilities to accelerate development velocity across the team
• Incorporate considerations for edge cases, failure modes, and business context into system design
• Participate in code and architecture reviews to ensure quality and distribute knowledge
• Own system reliability — monitor, debug, and improve service health, latency, and availability
• Proactively participate in resolving ongoing incidents
• Unblock, support, and effectively communicate across teams to achieve results
• Share your knowledge by giving brown bags, tech talks, and evangelizing engineering and AI best practices

Experience:

• 5+ years of software engineering industry experience
• Strong backend engineering fundamentals — designing, building, and operating distributed systems and microservices in production
• Hands-on experience with LLMs, agentic workflows, or building AI Agents — we value depth of AI experience and treat it as a strong differentiator
• Track record of building, evaluating, and shipping GenAI or ML-powered products
• Experience defining API schemas and developing backend services in a microservices environment
• When facing an ambiguous problem or outside your expertise, you can quickly learn what you need to dig in, make sense of it, and start working toward a solution
• You're a great communicator who can advocate for your proposals while empathizing with your teammates' goals and priorities
• You have a history of going out of your way to help your fellow engineers be more productive

It would be a huge plus to have:

• Strong proficiency in Python
• Experience with AI agent frameworks, prompt engineering, or model evaluation pipelines

Benefits:

• Great medical, dental, and vision insurance options with additional programs available when enrolled
• Mental health benefits
• Family building benefits
• Child care and pet benefits
• 401(k) plan with company match to help save for your future
• In addition to 12 observed holidays, salaried team members have discretionary paid time off, hourly team members have 15 days paid time off
• 18 weeks of paid parental leave. Biological, adoptive, and foster parents are all eligible
• Subsidized com