Software Engineer, Trust & Safety
Vercel is hiring a Software Engineer, Trust & Safety in San Francisco, United States. It pays $208k-$312k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Vercel.
Level's read on this job
- On Level's scale, this software engineer role is Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
- The listed pay starts 24% above the typical software engineer posting on Level.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include OpenAI, prompt engineering and AI agents.
- Level classifies it as a senior role.
- Level lists 94 other open roles at Vercel.
AI in this role
About Vercel:
Vercel is the agentic infrastructure company, freeing people and agents to ship what's next. For more than a decade we've helped builders move from idea to production with speed, security, and exceptional developer experience.
Now we're scaling our products for both agents and people to ship and run software, built in the open and trusted by OpenAI, PayPal, Ramp, Supreme, and millions of developers worldwide.
About the role:
We are looking for a Software Engineer, Trust & Safety, to design, build, and operate the large-scale, real-time distributed systems that stop abuse and fraud on the platform, including fraud committed through AI agents, fraud that abuses deployments and compute resources, and payment fraud on token-based usage. You will write the services, detection systems, and large language model (LLM) tooling that disrupt abuse at internet scale. This is a hybrid role based in San Francisco or New York City, with three days a week in the office.
What you’ll do:
- Design and build production services that detect and disrupt fraud committed through AI agents, fraud that abuses deployments and compute resources, and payment fraud on token-based usage
- Build detection systems that find abuse patterns across large datasets
- Ship LLM-driven systems for abuse detection, classification, and prevention, and build the datasets and evaluation pipelines that measure them
- Build and maintain internal tools for trust and safety workflows
- Analyze threat actor behavior to inform detection logic, and work with security, product, and infrastructure teams to move prototypes into stable production
What you need:
- 5+ years of software engineering experience building large-scale, real-time distributed systems
- Wrote and shipped production code in JavaScript/TypeScript and Python, owning systems end to end from prototype through deployment and iteration
- Hands-on LLM experience, including prompt engineering, evaluation, and fine-tuning
- Operated production services on AWS
Bonus if you:
- Shipped an AI-based trust and safety system to production
- Worked in abuse prevention, trust and safety, or security engineering
- Built or hosted a project on Vercel
Benefits & Compensation:
- Competitive compensation package, including equity.
- Inclusive Healthcare Package.
- Learn and Grow - we provide mentorship and send you to events that help you build your network and skills.
- Flexible Time Off.
- We will provide you the gear you need to do your role, and a WFH budget for you to outfit your space as needed.
The San Francisco, CA base pay range for this role is $208,000 - $312,000. Actual salary will be based on job-related skills, experience, and location. Compensation outside of San Francisco may be adjusted based on employee location. The total compensation package may include benefits, equity-based compensation, and eligibility for a company bonus or variable pay program depending on the role. Your recruiter can share more details during the hiring process.
Disclosures:
- Privacy: Please review our Job Applicant Privacy Policy for more information on how we handle your data.
- Equal Opportunity: Vercel is committed to fostering and empowering an inclusive community within our organization. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, national origin, citizenship, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Vercel encourages everyone to apply for our available positions, even if they don't necessarily check every box on the job description.
How we rate this
Software Engineer, Trust & Safety at Vercel rates 87 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Also common in software engineer jobs at this level
Pay
- This job starts at
- $208k
- Typical software engineer job
- $168k
This posting starts 24% above the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs
Questions you could be asked
- How do you structure and test a prompt to get consistent output from a language model?
- How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
- Walk me through fine-tuning a model: what data did you use, and how did you check the result?
- What's a project where you used OpenAI hands-on?
- How would you decide a model or AI system is ready to ship?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: Prompt engineering, AI agents, Fine-tuning, and OpenAI. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.
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