{"id":751826,"url":"https://alion.io/job/waystationai-senior-software-engineer","title":"Senior Software Engineer","company":{"id":686294,"name":"Waystation AI","domain":"waystationai.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/waystationai","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":null},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Redwood City, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":146000,"max_usd":269000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":2304},"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Claude Code","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-03-18T18:17:43Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-03-18","last_verified_at":"2026-09-28T23:27:44Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":194,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":193},"description":"Waystation AI | Redwood City, CA (in person, 5 days/week) | Full-time\nOwn whole product areas end to end, on a growing engineering team where something customer-visible ships every week.\nAbout Waystation\nCPG is a $2 trillion market in the U.S., and the manufacturers behind it still run procurement out of email and spreadsheets. Waystation turns supplier email into a structured system of record - every quote, spec, COA, and PO extracted automatically - then gives procurement, QA, and R&D a platform to compare ingredients, track certifications, and draft supplier comms on top of it.\nSeed-stage, venture-backed, with paying customers including national bakery, supplement, and better-for-you brands. One customer saved over $200,000 in the first three months. Led by repeat founder Ryan Caldbeck (previously CircleUp); backed by Founder Collective, Homebrew, Slow Ventures, 87 Capital, Floodgate, and SuccessVP.\nWhat you'll own\nWhole product areas, end to end. Supplier comparison, cert tracking, quote workflows. Backend, interface, and the follow-through after launch - not tickets.\n\nImpact you can point to. One of six engineers and growing, at a company with real customers and a market measured in trillions. What you ship this month shows up in a renewal conversation next month, and there's no layer between you and that.\n\nA weekly shipping cadence. Rough and working beats perfect and late. Then you come back and make it right.\n\nAI as product. Extraction, comparison, drafting, retrieval. Including the unglamorous parts: evals, fallbacks, and what to do when the model is confidently wrong.\n\nThe customer's actual problem. You'll be on customer calls. Requirements don't arrive pre-chewed.\n\nQuality that holds. When something breaks, you fix the system, not the symptom.\n\nWhat we're looking for\nWe'll back the right engineer over the right résumé.\n5+ years building production software, with real depth across the stack.\n\n2+ years at an early-stage startup (seed to Series B) - required. No playbook, no infrastructure handed to you. A purely big-company background isn't a fit.\n\nYou love building product. The one we won't compromise on. You care what it feels like to use and you have opinions about the interface. If you'd rather be handed a spec than help write one, this will frustrate you.\n\nFluent in AI, both directions. You build with it - we live in Claude Code - and you ship model-powered features reliable enough to sell.\n\nYou communicate with precision. An engineer, a customer, and the CEO all leave knowing what you decided and why.\n\nYou close things. Messy problems start to finish, and you flag slippage before it slips.\n\nYou're all in. Small team, office five days a week, rocket ship you plant a flag on - not a stepping stone.\n\nBonus: B2B SaaS in workflow-heavy industries; email, documents, or messy unstructured data; CPG, supply chain, or procurement; search and retrieval; multi-language data (Chinese, Spanish).\nNot the role for you if\nYou want a defined lane and a clean backlog.\n\nYou need finished design and product specs before you start.\n\nYou'd choose architectural elegance over what ships this week.\n\nFive days a week in Redwood City, customer calls, and the occasional plant floor in a hairnet don't appeal.\n\nWhat we offer\nCompetitive base salary and meaningful equity. Full health, dental, and vision. Unlimited vacation. Direct work with a repeat founder and CEO, and a front-row seat to how an AI-native company gets built.\nValues\nWe are reliable, credible, and authentic. We are solution-oriented. We are proud of our work, our customers, and ourselves.\nHow to apply\nSkip the cover letter. Send two things:\nSomething you built that you're proud of. What was true before, what you built, what was true after.\n\nA product call you got wrong. What you believed, what happened, what you changed.\n\nShort is fine. We're reading for ownership and judgment, not polish. We move in days, not weeks.","description_format":"text","description_chars":3939,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[{"language":"Chinese","level":"All levels","optional":false}]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","Transportation & Logistics","Supply Chain"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-11T15:56:43Z"},{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-25T20:54:44Z"}],"liveness":{"score":5,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.184,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":193,"expected_fill_days":23,"reasons":["conf:4","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-09-28T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/waystationai-senior-software-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/waystationai-senior-software-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-09-29T02:30:22Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":2266,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":2734,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-09-30T00:00:00Z"}}}