AI Engineer at Valsoft Corporation in CA

About KidKare

The people who care for and feed children every day have enough on their plates. Their software shouldn't add to it.

For more than 30 years, KidKare has built technology for the people behind childcare and child nutrition, helping them spend less time on paperwork, compliance, and administrative work and more time focused on the children and communities they serve.

Our roots run deep in the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP), a federal nutrition program that helps provide healthy meals and snacks to children and adults across the country. Today, we're building on that expertise with a growing ecosystem of software supporting childcare organizations across food program compliance, business management, professional development, and licensing.

We have a much bigger vision for what we can do across the childcare community with a strong plan focused on bringing more value to customers through new features, modules, and products. To support these goals, we're looking for an AI Engineer to embed within one of our mature, deeply configurable platforms that has real functional and technical complexity built up over years of customer-driven development.

Position Summary

You'll be working inside a legacy codebase with established architecture, business rules, and customer commitments, and your job is twofold:

(1) use AI tooling to extend and modernize what these platforms can do, and

(2) use that same AI expertise to make our existing engineering teams faster and sharper — compressing the time between a customer requirement and a shipped, correct solution.

You will work directly with engineering leads, product, and operators to find where AI-assisted development — code generation, automated testing, requirement-to-implementation acceleration, intelligent tooling — can shorten delivery cycles without sacrificing quality, especially under aggressive customer timelines.

If you enjoy going deep into complex, configurable systems and making both the product and the team around it faster, this role is for you.

Your mission: use AI to multiply the output and accuracy of our development teams, while extending the intelligence of the platforms themselves.

Primary Responsibilities

Accelerate team delivery

· Introduce and operationalize AI-assisted development practices (code generation, AI pair-programming, automated test generation) across existing engineering teams.

· Identify friction points in how requirements move from customer ask to shipped feature, and apply AI tooling to close the gap.

· Partner with developers working in Angular, React, C#, and TypeScript to embed AI tooling into their actual day-to-day workflow — not a side project.

· Build reusable patterns/playbooks so AI-assisted delivery scales across teams, not just your own output.

Extend platform intelligence

· Design, develop, and deploy AI features directly into existing, deeply configurable SaaS platforms.

· Integrate LLMs and ML models into legacy architectures without destabilizing existing functional/technical requirements.

· Build automation pipelines that reduce manual operational tasks within the product and internally.

· Develop intelligent agents and AI-powered workflow systems where they create measurable leverage.

Architect AI Infrastructure

· Implement RAG systems and embedding pipelines.

· Work with vector databases and retrieval systems.

· Build AI orchestration layers and agent frameworks.

· Ensure reliability, monitoring, and evaluation of AI outputs.

· Deploy and maintain models in production environments.

Collaborate cross-functionally

· Work directly with engineering leads and non-technical stakeholders to understand both platform constraints and business pain points.

· Translate ambiguous problems — in the product or in the development process — into scalable AI solutions.

· Balance speed with engineering rigor, especially against aggressive customer-driven timelines.

· Drive execution with minimal oversight.

Required Technical Skills

Core engineering

· Experience working within deeply configurable, enterprise-grade SaaS platforms (not greenfield products).

· Strong Python expertise (required).

· Comfortable across multiple languages/frameworks — Angular, React, C#, and TypeScript.

· Backend development experience (APIs, microservices) in a mature production codebase.

· Experience deploying production systems; familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or GCP).

· CI/CD, Docker, containerization.

AI & ML systems

Experience with:

· LLM integration (OpenAI, Anthropic, open-source models, etc.)

· AI-assisted development tooling (code generation / coding copilots, applied at team scale, not just individually)

· Prompt engineering

· RAG pipelines

· Vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS, etc.)

· Embeddings and semantic search

Familiarity with:

· Model fine-tuning (where relevant)

· Supervised / unsupervised learning

· Evaluation frameworks for LLM systems

· Understanding of hallucination mitigation, guardrails, and output validation.

Data & automation

Experience with:

· Building data pipelines and ETL processes.

· Working with structured & unstructured data.

· API integrations across SaaS platforms.

· Automation tooling and workflow orchestration.

MLOps & productionization

Experience with:

• Model versioning and experiment tracking.

• Monitoring model performance.

• Logging and observability.

• A/B testing AI features.

You'll Probably Love This Role If…

· Have worked inside complex, long-lived SaaS codebases and know how to introduce change.

· Enjoy autonomy and ownership.

· Thrive in fast-moving environments with real customer deadlines.

· Want to make both a platform and a team measurably faster.

Required Qualifications

· Deep comfort working inside legacy, configurable enterprise platforms.

· Highly hands-on — you ship, not just design.

· Multiplier mindset — as interested in making the team faster as in making the product smarter.

· Comfortable with ambiguity and aggressive timelines.

· Business-oriented — you care about ROI and customer-facing impact.

· Pragmatic — uses the right tool, not the fanciest one.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with CACFP, childcare, child nutrition, education, government programs, or other regulated industries is a huge plus, but not a requirement.

CACFP has its own language, regulations, acronyms, and complexities. If you already know it, amazing. If you don't, you'll be surrounded by an exceptional team of people who do, and we'll help you get up to speed.

Why KidKare?

We're at an exciting inflection point, taking decades of experience in childcare and child nutrition and using it to build a broader ecosystem of products for the organizations and people who help care for our communities.

If you want to roll up your sleeves to help modernize a legacy, configurable enterprise platform and are as interested in making the team faster alongside the product smarter, this role is for you.

All qualified applicants will be afforded equal employment opportunities without discrimination because of race, creed, color, national origin, sex, age, disability, or marital status.

#KidKare