Staff Software Developer (Java) - LLMs

Summary

Join Lightspeed's new AI squad and contribute to building AI-powered tools and capabilities. You will be responsible for backend engineering in a Spring Boot Java environment, designing and implementing AI-powered tools and product features, and collaborating with other teams to integrate LLMs and AI patterns. This hands-on role offers opportunities to explore and apply modern AI techniques, grow your knowledge of LLMs, and build production-ready systems. Prior experience with LLMs, agent frameworks, or AI APIs is a plus but not required.

Requirements

• At least 7 years of experience in backend development
• Strong Java and Spring Boot experience in production environments
• Proven technical leadership experience
• Solid understanding of REST APIs, databases (SQL/NoSQL), and system architecture
• Familiarity with Docker, CI/CD pipelines, and Kubernetes
• Strong communication and collaboration skills
• Comfortable writing well-structured, maintainable code
• Interest in AI technologies and willingness to grow in this space

Responsibilities

• Building and maintaining backend services and APIs in a Spring Boot Java environment
• Designing and implementing AI-powered tools and product features
• Collaborating with other teams to help them integrate LLMs and AI patterns
• Exploring and applying LLM capabilities such as summarization, classification, RAG, and prompt pipelines
• Writing clean, maintainable, and well-tested backend code
• Ensuring reliability, performance, and scalability of the systems you build
• Staying up to date with developments in the AI space and sharing insights with your team

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with one additional backend language (especially Python)
• Exposure to LLM APIs (e.g. OpenAI, Claude), prompt engineering, or agent frameworks
• Knowledge of vector search, semantic retrieval, or document indexing
• Experience building internal tools or customer-facing AI features
• Familiarity with observability tools and performance monitoring
• Understanding of security, access controls, and API standards

Benefits

• Lots of autonomy, flexible work culture with the option of working remotely or from one of our beautiful offices
• Genuine career growth opportunities within a company that's continuously expanding
• Make a meaningful impact by helping teams and customers work more effectively with AI
• Be part of a team large enough for growth yet agile enough for real impact
• Work on high-traffic products with a global user base
• Opportunity to work alongside other highly skilled engineers, learn and expand your skill set, forge wonderful relationships and make your mark within the diverse and inclusive Lightspeed culture, a true Canadian tech success story
• Lightspeed share scheme (we are all owners)
• Flexible working policy
• Mental health online platform and counseling & coaching services
• Health and wellness benefits
• LinkedIn Learning license (learning is always ongoing)
• Volunteer day to be able to give back to society!