Staff/Principal Software Engineer

Department: Core team

Location: San Francisco

Compensation: $300K – $350K • 0.8% – 1.1% • Visa sponsorship available

Employment Type: FullTime

Staff/Principal Software Engineer

At Synthetic we are synthetically recreating the professional service of bookkeeping using AI. Our product processes financial data, manages bookkeeping workflows, and communicates with customers autonomously. Read more about us in Betakit and Axios.

We are the founding team that previously built Bench Accounting from an idea to a successful business with >$100M raised and >600 employees, and Teal (acquired by Mercury). We're back in the SMB accounting space, this time working on a bigger idea with even greater potential.

Synthetic was founded in November 2025. We're a seven person team so far. We have early test customers and a working prototype of our product that's advancing daily. We're seeking someone smart and hungry to join up and help build the next iterations of the product. We are building in San Francisco. We work 6 days a week in person to make our product a reality.

We're looking for people of exceptional competence to join our team. If this is you, and you want to work on the future of autonomous professional services, apply.

What you'll do here

• Build agents that interact with customers and do accounting autonomously.

• Build an accounting ledger from the ground up.

• Integrate with financial data providers.

• Ship new features daily in Typescript/NextJS.

• Make lots of decisions quickly.

• Take risks.

What you bring to the table

• 5+ years software engineering experience.

• A pragmatic approach to building fast at the early stages of a company.

• Familiarity and deep interest in the rapidly changing capabilities of LLMs.

• Interest in discovering what problems our customers face and how we can solve them.

• A sense of agency and urgency.

• A severe bullshit allergy.

Compensation

• $300-350k USD salary

• 0.8% - 1.1% FD equity

• Health benefits

• We sponsor visas for exceptional candidates worldwide

More about Synthetic

We're a team of startup veterans focused on building a successful company quickly. Synthetic could be a fit for you if you're looking to join highly competent teammates that focus on winning pragmatically.

Synthetic has a simple, no-frills culture. We work 6 days a week. We hire only S-tier competence.

Synthetic was founded in November 2025 by Ian Crosby. Synthetic is backed by Khosla Ventures.