Staff Engineer
About the Role
This is a high-ownership Staff Engineer role at a seed-stage AI and people-data company in San Francisco. You will be a foundational technical contributor, shaping core infrastructure and platform architecture at a critical early stage. The work directly influences the company's long-term technical direction.
What You'll Do
Design, build, and operate core infrastructure for a people-data and agent platform, 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 across cloud and Linux server environments.
Own projects end-to-end, from ambiguous problem definition through deployment and iteration, shipping quickly without compromising system integrity.
Collaborate directly with senior leadership on technical decisions, roadmap priorities, and foundational architectural choices.
Contribute broadly across the stack, including developer documentation, technical tutorials, internal tooling, and experimental builds that showcase and stress-test APIs.
What We're Looking For
10 or more years of professional software engineering experience shipping code to production at scale.
Hands-on experience with Linux servers in a production environment.
Experience with agent orchestration, LLMs, or web scraping.
Experience designing or operating APIs, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP), or high-volume data pipelines.
Demonstrated ability to take ambiguous projects from architecture through deployment and iteration with minimal oversight.
A degree in computer science or a closely related field from a well-regarded university.
Experience at a high-growth tech company or early-stage startup; previous founding experience is a plus.
Based in San Francisco and comfortable working on-site.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary in the range of $250,000 to $300,000 USD annually, plus equity. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.
Location
On-site in San Francisco, CA, United States.