Demo

Senior Software Engineer

Objective Partners
Knoxville, TN Full Time
POSTED ON 4/9/2026
AVAILABLE BEFORE 5/7/2026
Senior Backend Engineer (AI & Distributed Systems)

Location: Remote (USA) / Major Tech Hubs

About the Opportunity We are seeking a seasoned Senior Engineer to spearhead the evolution of a sophisticated enterprise platform by integrating advanced AI capabilities with robust distributed systems. This is a high-impact role where you will bridge the gap between traditional backend excellence and the frontier of production-grade AI orchestration. You will move beyond simple prototypes to build reliable, high-scale systems that leverage agentic workflows and complex data pipelines to drive tangible business outcomes.

Responsibilities

  • System Ownership: Lead the complete lifecycle of customer-centric features, from initial architectural design and estimation to deployment and ongoing production maintenance.
  • AI Orchestration: Architect and maintain production-level Large Language Model (LLM) integrations, including the development of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and automated agentic workflows with human-in-the-loop safeguards.
  • Reliability & Governance: Implement rigorous evaluation frameworks for mixed deterministic and probabilistic systems, ensuring high standards for observability, security, and behavioral regression testing.
  • Architectural Evolution: Define and enforce strict API contracts and data schemas while strategically modernizing legacy components to enhance system maintainability and development velocity.
  • Engineering Excellence: Champion superior coding standards through the creation of pragmatic abstractions, comprehensive documentation, and a culture of meaningful automated testing.
  • Operational Integrity: Manage model lifecycles and prompt engineering performance, establishing quantitative benchmarks to ensure all AI outputs meet strict acceptance criteria.

Requirements (Must-have)

  • Professional Experience: Typically 7 years of experience delivering scalable production software in customer-facing environments.
  • Backend Mastery: Expert-level proficiency in C#/.NET or a similar enterprise-grade stack, with a deep understanding of concurrency, performance tuning, and data modeling.
  • Distributed Systems: Proven track record of designing distributed services with a focus on versioning discipline and backward compatibility.
  • Data Expertise: Advanced SQL skills (PostgreSQL or SQL Server), including complex schema design and query optimization.
  • AI Integration: Experience combining traditional code with probabilistic model outputs via validation layers, guardrails, and structured enforcement.
  • Infrastructure: Proficiency in cloud-native environments (Azure, AWS, or GCP) and containerization strategies.
  • Problem Solving: Exceptional debugging skills with a relentless focus on root cause analysis and sustainable architectural fixes.

Preferred Qualifications (Nice-to-have)

  • Advanced AI Implementation: Experience shipping production-ready RAG pipelines, vector search implementations, and multi-step tool-calling workflows.
  • AI Observability: Familiarity with tracing prompts, monitoring inference costs/latency, and detecting model drift.
  • Regulated Industries: Background building software within frameworks requiring high levels of auditability or regulatory compliance.
  • Frontend Literacy: Competency in TypeScript frameworks (such as React) and a pragmatic approach to end-to-end testing strategies (e.g., Playwright).
  • DevOps Mindset: Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code and maturing CI/CD pipelines.

Salary.com Estimation for Senior Software Engineer in Knoxville, TN
$114,161 to $137,541
If your compensation planning software is too rigid to deploy winning incentive strategies, it’s time to find an adaptable solution. Compensation Planning
Enhance your organization's compensation strategy with salary data sets that HR and team managers can use to pay your staff right. Surveys & Data Sets

What is the career path for a Senior Software Engineer?

Sign up to receive alerts about other jobs on the Senior Software Engineer career path by checking the boxes next to the positions that interest you.
Income Estimation: 
$123,167 - $152,295
Income Estimation: 
$146,673 - $180,130
Income Estimation: 
$149,493 - $192,976
Income Estimation: 
$184,796 - $233,226
Employees: Get a Salary Increase
View Core, Job Family, and Industry Job Skills and Competency Data for more than 15,000 Job Titles Skills Library

Job openings at Objective Partners

  • Objective Partners Cleveland, OH
  • Job Description The Project Manager within the EPMO is responsible for planning, executing, and closing projects successfully. They ensure projects are del... more
  • 9 Days Ago

  • Objective Partners Dover, DE
  • We seek an SAP Integration Lead to design, build, and operate modern integrations on SAP BTP Integration Suite (CPI) connecting SAP S/4HANA with internal a... more
  • 10 Days Ago

  • Objective Partners Chicago, IL
  • We’re partnering with a high-performance trading firm to find a seasoned software engineer who’s eager to build, optimize, and support the critical systems... more
  • 11 Days Ago

  • Objective Partners Chicago, IL
  • Senior .NET Software Engineer Full-Time – Remote/Hybrid/In-Office This role requires at least three visits per year to the Chicago headquarters , including... more
  • 13 Days Ago


Not the job you're looking for? Here are some other Senior Software Engineer jobs in the Knoxville, TN area that may be a better fit.

  • Crowe Knoxville, TN
  • Your Journey at Crowe Starts Here: At Crowe, you can build a meaningful and rewarding career. With real flexibility to balance work with life moments, you’... more
  • 4 Days Ago

  • Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge, TN
  • Requisition Id16205 Overview: We are seeking aSeniorNuclearInstrumentation & ControlsSoftwareEngineerto jointheInstrumentation and Control Software Enginee... more
  • 4 Days Ago

AI Assistant is available now!

Feel free to start your new journey!