Software Engineer - Platform / Applied AI (Full-Stack)

Location: San Francisco, California, United States

Workplace: on_site

Description

Position: Software Engineer - Platform / Applied AI (Full-Stack)

Location: San Francisco, CA | Full-time | In person

Compensation: $260,000–$290,000 + equity

THE ROLE

Our client is looking for a Software Engineer to join their team to own core platform and data infrastructure alongside the founding team. The work spans full-stack product surfaces, desktop data-capture workflows, high-throughput pipelines, and foundational architecture. The engineer will have direct founder access and substantial responsibility for decisions that shape the growing engineering team.

WHAT YOU WILL OWN

- Build and scale data-capture workflows across Next.js web applications and Python desktop systems.

- Improve reliability, throughput, and performance under heavy production loads.

- Architect data pipelines and make greenfield decisions about storage, caching, search, and message queues.

- Establish engineering practices and scalable system patterns.

- Work directly with the founders on product strategy and ship features quickly.

- Take ideas from design through production and balance delivery speed with reliability.

Requirements

REQUIRED TECHNICAL EXPERIENCE

- Full-stack JavaScript/Next.js and Python application development.

- Strong coding fundamentals in Node.js/TypeScript, Python, and/or Go.

- Serverless architecture and cloud functions for substantial data processing on AWS or GCP.

- Distributed systems, scalability, system design, and clear reasoning about technical trade-offs.

- Hands-on experience with Redis caching, Elasticsearch indexing, and Kafka, RabbitMQ, or comparable message queues.

- Familiarity with Kubernetes, APIs, and NoSQL databases.

- Evidence of personally getting ideas into production.

NICE TO HAVE

- AI research, LLM evaluation, or human-in-the-loop systems.

- AI agents or reinforcement-learning environments.

- Founder or early engineering experience.

STRONG CANDIDATE SIGNALS

- An active GitHub showing sustained building.

- Ownership of production systems with measurable reliability or throughput results.

- Experience with both user-facing software and demanding data infrastructure.

- Proactive decisions in ambiguous, fast-moving startup work.

- Clear motivation to work in AI operations and at an early-stage company.

- Willingness to work the intense hours described in the hiring brief.

Benefits

Compensation

$260,000–$290,000 + equity

Benefits

Equity grant vesting over four years, health insurance, covered daily lunch and dinner, and a gym membership.