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.

Key responsibilities

• 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, focusing 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.

Required profile

• 10+ 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.
• 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.

Required skills

• Linux server administration
• API design and development
• LLM (large language model) integration
• Web scraping
• Knowledge graph architecture
• Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP)
• Distributed systems
• High‑volume data pipelines

What we offer

• Base salary $250,000–$300,000 USD annually, plus equity.
• No visa sponsorship available.