Staff Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Employment Type: FullTime

About the Role

A well-funded, early-stage AI/data startup in San Francisco is looking for a Staff Engineer to join their small, high-impact team. This is a foundational technical hire — you'll help architect and scale a real-time people-data and AI agent platform processing millions of API requests. You'll work directly with company leadership on decisions that shape the product and company for years to come.

This role is ideal for a high-agency, first-principles engineer who thrives in ambiguity, wants genuine end-to-end ownership, and is drawn to the pace and challenge of early-stage company building — perhaps with founder aspirations of their own.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and operate core infrastructure powering a people-data and AI agent platform — including APIs, LLM-powered workflows, web scraping systems, and large-scale knowledge graph architecture.

• Architect and maintain production-grade systems capable of handling millions of API requests, with a sharp 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 sacrificing system integrity.

• Collaborate directly with the CEO and CTO on technical decisions, roadmap priorities, and foundational architectural choices.

• Contribute broadly across the stack — developer documentation, technical tutorials, internal tooling, and experimental builds that showcase and stress-test the platform's APIs.

What We're Looking For

Required:

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience with a track record of shipping code to production supporting a large user base.

• Hands-on experience working with Linux servers in a production environment.

• Experience with agent orchestration, large language models (LLMs), or web scraping at scale.

Nice to Have:

• Experience at a high-growth or well-regarded tech company or startup.

• Previous experience as a founder or early-stage engineer.

• Familiarity with distributed systems, microservices, data pipelines, or cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP).

• Background in AI/ML, data enrichment, or people/identity data platforms.

Please note: Visa sponsorship is not available for this role. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $250,000 – $300,000 per year

• Equity participation in a seed-stage, venture-backed company

• Opportunity to grow into a defining technical leadership role as the company scales toward Series A

Location

This is an on-site role based in San Francisco, CA. Candidates should be located in or willing to relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area.