Staff Engineer

About the Role

This is a high-ownership Staff Engineer role at a seed-stage AI and people-data company in San Francisco. You will be a foundational technical contributor, shaping core infrastructure and platform architecture at a critical early stage. The work directly influences the company's long-term technical direction.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and operate core infrastructure for a people-data and agent platform, including APIs, LLM-powered workflows, scraping systems, and large-scale knowledge graph architecture.
• Architect and maintain production-grade systems capable of handling millions of API requests, with a 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 compromising system integrity.
• Collaborate directly with senior leadership on technical decisions, roadmap priorities, and foundational architectural choices.
• Contribute broadly across the stack, including developer documentation, technical tutorials, internal tooling, and experimental builds that showcase and stress-test APIs.

What We're Looking For

• 10 or more years of professional software engineering experience shipping code to production at scale.
• Hands-on experience with Linux servers in a production environment.
• Experience with agent orchestration, LLMs, or web scraping.
• Experience designing or operating APIs, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP), or high-volume data pipelines.
• Demonstrated ability to take ambiguous projects from architecture through deployment and iteration with minimal oversight.
• A degree in computer science or a closely related field from a well-regarded university.
• Experience at a high-growth tech company or early-stage startup; previous founding experience is a plus.
• Based in San Francisco and comfortable working on-site.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary in the range of $250,000 to $300,000 USD annually, plus equity. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, CA, United States.