Staff Engineer

About the Role This is a foundational engineering role at a seed-stage AI/people-data startup, sitting at the intersection of infrastructure, LLM-powered workflows, and large-scale data systems. You'll work directly with executive leadership to shape technical strategy and build the core agent platform from the ground up — with real ownership and outsized impact. What You'll Do Design, build, and operate core 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 strong focus on performance, cost efficiency, and reliability. Own projects end-to-end — from ambiguous problem definition through deployment and iteration — shipping quickly without sacrificing system integrity. Collaborate directly with executive leadership on technical decisions, roadmap priorities, and long-term architectural direction. Contribute broadly across the stack, including developer documentation, internal tooling, technical tutorials, and experimental builds that stress-test the platform. What We're Looking For 10+ years of professional software engineering experience with a strong track record of shipping to production at scale. Hands-on experience with Linux servers in production environments. Experience with agent orchestration, LLMs, or web scraping. Familiarity with distributed systems, cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP), microservices, and data pipelines. Background at a high-growth tech company or early-stage startup; prior founding experience is a strong plus. High agency, comfort with ambiguity, and a first-principles approach to problem-solving. Currently based in San Francisco. Compensation & Benefits Salary range: $250,000 – $300,000 USD annually . Visa sponsorship is not available. Location On-site in San Francisco, CA, United States .