Staff Frontier Engineer

About this role

Staff Frontier Engineer Frontier Engineering Remote - US Multiple Hires

Overview: Pax8 is the technology marketplace of the future, linking partners, vendors, and small to midsized businesses (SMBs) through AI-powered insights and comprehensive product support. With a global partner ecosystem of over 35,000 managed service providers, Pax8 empowers SMBs worldwide by providing software and services that unlock their growth potential and enhance their security. Committed to innovating cloud commerce at scale, Pax8 drives customer acquisition and solution consumption across its entire ecosystem.

Our purpose is to help every small business turn their dreams into reality through the power of technology.

Culture is important to us, and at Pax8, it’s business, and it IS personal. We embody Compassionate Candour by aiming to assist others with candid, actionable feedback. We Seek to Understand by being open, curious, and committed to learning. We believe in We Before Me, actively collaborating and seeking out diverse perspectives to ensure a win for Team Pax8. Our team takes pride in Do What You Say, taking ownership, honoring commitments, prioritizing, and delivering on promises. We encourage everyone to Light Up Learning by being brave and trying new ideas, embracing vulnerability, and sharing failures so everyone can learn. Finally, we are Driven by Passion, connecting personal passion to Pax8's mission, and remaining resilient in the face of adversity and uncertainty in pursuit of our goals.

At Pax8, we are passionate, creative, and humorously offbeat. We work hard, keep it fun, and expect the best.

*This is a proactive opportunity posting, allowing us to connect with exceptional talent for anticipated future openings within Pax8.

Position Summary: The Staff Frontier Engineer role requires depth and reach together: the system is technically hard in its own right, and enough of Product & Engineering builds on it that one engineer getting it right compounds across the entire org. A representative problem is identity and entitlements, where everything depends on it and it is genuinely one of the harder problems in software. On the AI side, it is the eval infrastructure that determines whether what ships is actually prompted well. The Staff Frontier Engineer is individually accountable for building, hardening, and operating a system that the organization depends on without directly touching. They hold the problem space durably, long enough to develop real expertise and innovate within it. They earn the right to set its direction by shipping the system rather than by advising on it.

This role is measured on five dimensions ( Craftsmanship, Impact, Mentorship, Safety, and State of the Art ). What separates it from Frontier Engineer is that Judgment, Systems Thinking, and Safety now have to hold up against a problem where being wrong is expensive and, often, no one else is positioned to catch it.

Essential Responsibilities (includes, but is not limited to): • Own, build, and operate a system that is hard enough to need its own technical strategy and technically deep in its own right, and help drive the technical specs behind it • Make consequential calls about what to build, scale, or kill on ambiguous problems where the data does not answer the question, driving them to clarity through iteration and collaboration, and own the outcome • Exercise Systems Thinking past your own ownership boundary: see and optimize the whole line end to end, and change your own plan, or push back on someone else's, when the end-to-end view says the locally optimal move is globally wrong. Pursue the real fix, by influencing, contributing, or escalating, even when it lives in a system you don't own • Own the work yourself: your domain is yours to run, so address the high-leverage problems in it, scope the solutions, and build them with a workforce of agents behind you • Instrument what you ship for adoption and usage from the start, and hold any claim of delivered value to a falsifiable, data-backed standard • Scale your own judgment into others: mentor engineers toward owning highly complex systems rather than only reviewing their output • Apply a categorically higher bar to safety, security, and irreversible-consequence risk: identify and close it out before it ships, covering both classic engineering risk (data loss, security vulnerabilities) and AI-specific risk (misuse, jailbreaks, unintended capability, data exposure), including deciding what not to ship when everything else is ready • Run the full lifecycle for adopting new techniques (discovery, spike, prototype, proof of concept, hardened production) in your problem space • Write documentation precise enough that other teams can consume your systems as a service without a standing coordination meeting

Ideal Skills, Experience, and Competencies:

Craftsmanship : • Building: Builds and operates a system that is hard enough to need its own technical strategy and technically deep in its own right, and helps drive the technical specs for it. Builds the tool that eliminates a repeated problem. • Judgment: Makes high-stakes calls on what to build, scale, or kill when the data runs out, and escalates the ones that belong to product • Writing: Documents at a level that sustains other teams consuming the system without a standing meeting, and presents technical direction to engineering and product audiences

Impact: • Outcomes: Instruments the system and proves delivered value against a falsifiable, data-backed standard • Systems Thinking: Lands fixes across ownership boundaries when the end-to-end view demands it, regardless of who owns the code • Mentorship: Grows another engineer's judgment

Safety: • Applies a categorically higher bar to irreversible-consequence risk on a system with organization-wide reach

State of the Art: • Owns the pipeline for adopting new techniques in the problem space

AI Foundations (All Roles): • Understand AI capabilities and limi

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