Senior Staff Software Engineer (Machine learning Platform)

About Tekion:

Positively disrupting an industry that has not seen any innovation in over 50 years, Tekion has challenged the paradigm with the first and fastest cloud-native automotive platform that includes the revolutionary Automotive Retail Cloud (ARC) for retailers, Automotive Enterprise Cloud (AEC) for manufacturers and other large automotive enterprises and Automotive Partner Cloud (APC) for technology and industry partners. Tekion connects the entire spectrum of the automotive retail ecosystem through one seamless platform. The transformative platform uses cutting-edge technology, big data, machine learning, and AI to seamlessly bring together OEMs, retailers/dealers and consumers. With its highly configurable integration and greater customer engagement capabilities, Tekion is enabling the best automotive retail experiences ever. Tekion employs close to 3,000 people across North America, Asia and Europe.

Why This Role Matters

This role powers Tekion’s AI‑native, end‑to‑end automotive platform by turning unified dealership data across DMS, CRM, Digital Retail, Service, and Payments into real‑time intelligence. You’ll operationalize a graph‑based contextual ecosystem so agents can retrieve the right context, enforce policy, and personalize experiences that drive measurable dealer outcomes. You’ll also build the resilient control layer - MCP and the LLM Gateway - that enables safe, cost‑efficient, multi‑provider LLM usage. Finally, you’ll define the standards for building, evaluating, deploying, and governing agentic systems so product teams can ship AI features quickly, safely, and at scale. In addition to enabling agentic systems powered by LLMs, this role also drives building the platform for classical ML models driving optimization across dealership operations.

What Makes This Opportunity Unique

This role offers direct, measurable impact on dealer outcomes and consumer experiences across Tekion’s Automotive Retail Cloud and Automotive Enterprise Cloud, with end‑to‑end ownership of an LLM control plane and gateway that serve multi‑tenant workloads under SLAs and, quality and cost guardrails. You’ll leverage a rich vertical dataset and domain graph spanning sales, service, parts, F&I, accounting, and consumer touchpoints to power context‑aware agents and retrieval‑augmented generation. You’ll also shape core levers - agent orchestration patterns, evaluation frameworks, and safety guardrails - so improvements in latency, reliability, evaluation quality, and safety translate into dealer KPIs like upsell, cycle time, CSAT, and service revenue. You’ll also maintain and enhance the platform to support classical supervised and unsupervised ML models .

Responsibilities

Build and run the LLM control plane/gateway: smart routing, rate limits/quotas, failover, and token/cost tracking.

Ship a unified API and SDKs (REST/gRPC) with normalized schemas, structured outputs, caching, and full observability (traces/logs/metrics).

Enforce safety and privacy by default: content filtering, prompt/response validation, and PII redaction.

Enable multi‑model, multi‑vendor use LLMs with automated canarying and versioning.

Own the agent runtime: tool registry, permissions, function calling, grounding, and retrieval.

Design orchestration patterns (sequential, planner‑executor, streaming) and manage agent state and long‑running workflows.

Enabling platform components for training and scoring pipelines for classical ML (e.g., XGBoost/LightGBM/linear/trees) and deep models; standardize experiment tracking and packaging.

Create components to Monitor model and data drift, retraining and tuning models as needed to maintain accuracy and relevance.

Add human‑in‑the‑loop review and safe‑actioning before agents touch dealer systems.