Staff Engineer

Role details

ABOUT THE ROLE This is a founding-team-level Staff Engineer role at a seed-stage AI/data infrastructure company building a real-time people data and agent platform. You'll work directly with executive leadership to shape the technical strategy and core architecture that powers the product — this is a high-ownership, high-impact position for someone who thinks like a founder. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Design, build, and operate core infrastructure including APIs, LLM-powered workflows, scraping systems, and large-scale knowledge graph architecture. - Architect and maintain production-grade systems capable of handling millions of API requests, with a focus on performance, cost efficiency, and reliability. - Own projects end-to-end — from ambiguous problem definition through deployment and iteration — shipping quickly without sacrificing system integrity. - Collaborate directly with the CEO and CTO on technical decisions, roadmap priorities, and foundational architectural choices. - Contribute broadly across the stack, including developer documentation, technical tutorials, internal tooling, and experimental builds. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 10+ years of professional software engineering experience with a strong track record of shipping to production at scale. - Hands-on experience with Linux servers in a production environment. - Experience with agent orchestration, LLMs, or web scraping. - Familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP), distributed systems, microservices, and data pipelines. - Background at a high-growth tech company or early-stage startup; prior founding experience is a strong plus. - High agency, comfort with ambiguity, and a first-principles approach to problem solving. - Currently based in San Francisco (on-site role). COMPENSATION & BENEFITS Salary: $250,000 – $300,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is not available. LOCATION On-site in San Francisco, CA, USA.