Staff Software Engineer
Staff Software Engineer
About Onshore
Onshore is the modern standard for U.S. companies claiming the R&D tax credit. We find, document, and defend the tax credits and deductions that farms, manufacturers, architects, and engineers have earned. Claiming the R&D tax credit has historically been an ordeal full of consultants, spreadsheets, and hidden fees. Now, our software and AI-powered solutions read every line of a client's records against the tax code, produce verified computations, and are reviewed by a credentialed tax professional before filing.
About the team
Engineering at Onshore is three teams, and Staff engineers own their technical direction. Platform & Agents builds the infrastructure everyone else runs on: the agent execution framework behind every study, the evaluation harness that proves agent output is correct before an expert sees it, and the tooling operators use to run engagements. Agriculture turns farm records into defensible R&D credit computations and is expanding into livestock, dairy, and soil fertility deductions. Corporate Tax & Compliance is taking Onshore from credit studies to the filing itself, with full corporate returns targeting general availability in early 2027.
Staff is the top of our ladder and it is an engineering role in the fullest sense. We run a technical leadership model: no direct reports by default, and your influence comes through architecture, code, and technical direction rather than headcount. You will never be asked to trade your editor for a calendar. The first Staff engineers here set the direction the next ten engineers inherit.
What you'll do
Define and drive the technical strategy for one of Onshore's three pillars, including multi-year architecture decisions across agent infrastructure, tax computation, and data pipelines
Own end-to-end technical solutions for the systems that can't be wrong: durable agent workflows, versioned tax computation, evaluation infrastructure, filing pipelines
Identify and lead the infrastructure investments that unlock what's next: new study types, new entity and state coverage, and higher leverage for the operators who run engagements
Make principled build-versus-buy decisions and produce technical roadmaps that balance near-term delivery against long-term platform health
Advise the founders and engineering leadership on technical trade-offs and their downstream implications for the business
Multiply the team: your primitives, designs, and reviews raise what every other engineer ships
About you
If you meet the minimum requirements, apply. The preferred qualifications are a bonus, not a gate, and we would rather see your work than a perfectly matched resume.
Minimum requirements
8+ years of software engineering experience, with demonstrated impact at staff or equivalent scope: leading initiatives across multiple teams or systems.
A proven track record designing and shipping systems that are both highly available and correct, in domains where wrong output has consequences.
Deep architectural judgment paired with genuinely fast hands. You prototype to think, and your strategy shows up as code.
The ability to influence technical direction and align teams without direct authority, with excellent written and verbal communication across engineering and leadership.
High ownership: comfortable with ambiguity, able to define the problem and the plan rather than execute a predefined spec.
Able to work in person at our New York City office.
Preferred qualifications
Experience making LLM-powered systems production-reliable: agents, evaluation infrastructure, structured extraction at scale. You know the distance between a demo and a system users rely on.
Experience owning platforms other teams built on, and the judgment about primitives versus one-offs that comes with it.
Compliance-aware system design: audit trails, data lineage, financial controls, or regulated-domain experience.
Experience with correctness-critical computation: ledgers, billing, rules engines, or anything compiler-shaped.
A track record of raising senior engineers through technical direction and of contributing meaningfully to hiring and engineering culture.
Pay and benefits
The annual base salary for this role is $270,000, with a total equity grant valued at $100,000. Equity is ISOs valued at our Series B preferred price, on a standard four-year vest with a one-year cliff and early exercise available. Benefits include health, dental, and vision coverage and unlimited PTO.
Our interview process
Three conversations, about two hours of live time, with a decision typically one day after each step.
Resume deep dive, 30 minutes. We go through your experience and projects at real depth: what you built, the decisions you made, and what you'd do differently. Bring the work you're proud of.
Take-home assessment, then a one-hour review. You build something on your own time, then walk us through it live: your assumptions, patterns, and tradeoffs. We care as much about how you reason through the decisions as the code itself.
Behavioral interview, 30 minutes. How you work, how you handle ambiguity and disagreement, and whether Onshore is the right place for you, in both directions.
No six-round gauntlets, no trick questions, no waiting weeks to hear back.