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 commuter benefits
Monthly Lyft credits and complimentary Lyft Pink membership

Lyft is an equal opportunity employer committed to an inclusive workplace that fosters belonging. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regards to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, age, genetic information, or any other basis prohibited by law. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories consistent with applicable federal, state and local law.

Lyft highly values having employees working in-office to foster a collaborative work environment and company culture. This role will be in-office on a hybrid schedule — Team Members will be expected to work in the office 3 days per week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Lyft considers working in the office at least 3 days per week to be an essential function of this hybrid role. Your recruiter can share more information about the various in-office perks Lyft offers. Additionally, hybrid roles have the flexibility to work from anywhere for up to 4 weeks per year. #Hybrid

The expected base pay range for this position in the San Francisco area is $185,000 - $222,000, not inclusive of potential equity offering, bonus or benefits. Salary ranges are dependent on a variety of factors, including qualifications, experience and geographic location. Your recruiter can share more information about the salary range specific to your working location and other factors during the hiring process.