Chief Engineer (Staff Engineer)

interface.ai•San Francisco, CA

1d•$335,000 - $375,000•Onsite

About The Position

interface.ai is the agentic AI platform for financial services — bringing conversational and agentic AI to the credit unions and community banks that serve everyday Americans. We're not a lab, we're not a demo company, and we're not burning runway on hypotheticals. We are in production, generating real revenue, and on a mission that matters: making intelligent financial services available to the millions of people who've never had a private banker. More than 100 banks and credit unions run on interface.ai, reaching over 10 million people. Many products are live today; the biggest bets — an AI-first contact center and an AI-native consumer banking experience — are what comes next. Backed by $30M in Series A funding and already cash-flow positive, we're at the inflection point: a proven product, paying customers, and a profitable business rebuilding itself as an AI-native company to lead a world where agents, not software, do the work. As a Chief Engineer you own a domain end-to-end and you are deeply hands-on. You architect and build alongside your team, you set the technical bar by doing the work, and you steer the rest of the domain through its engineers and leads. You run a pod directly, hold a weekly council seat alongside the founders, and partner with your Domain PM as an equal. This is the most senior technical track in the company — leadership through technical credibility, not headcount. Because AI handles the routine, everyone on the team is senior and high-leverage. This is a rare chance to own an entire domain of a profitable, category-leading AI company outright — and to shape where banking goes next.

Requirements

A senior-most individual contributor (Staff level) or a hands-on technical founder who never stopped building.
You've owned a critical domain or system end-to-end at high scale, or at a high-velocity Series A–D startup — and you can walk through the decisions you made, and the ones you considered and rejected.
Deep technical credibility — you lead through the work, not headcount, and you've driven major technical decisions across teams without relying on direct authority.
Still in the code — you architect, review, and build; you are not someone who stopped touching the system years ago or an “architect” who only produces diagrams.
Extreme AI fluency — you use frontier AI tools daily and have rebuilt your workflow around them. “Copilot for autocomplete sometimes” is not enough.
First-principles problem-solving, high learning velocity (you ramp on a new domain in weeks), and a tolerance for the ambiguity and pace of a startup building process where none exists.
Strong systems and reliability instincts, with real ownership of production systems at scale.
BS/BA in Computer Science required; MS or PhD a strong plus.
San Francisco-based and committed to working onsite.
H1B transfers welcome.

Nice To Haves

Conversational AI, voice AI, or agentic systems built and run at production scale.
Fintech, banking, or regulated financial services background.
A 0→1 platform, system, or product that others went on to build on.
Published writing, conference talks, or open-source work in AI systems or platform engineering.

Responsibilities

Architecture and build — you design the systems for your domain and you write the code; you set the technical standard by example, not from a distance.
The technical bar — you ship, you review, and you hold the line on quality and velocity across your domain's pods.
The engineers and leads in your domain — you steer and unblock them, growing the technical capability of the team without becoming a pure manager.
Outcomes, with your Domain PM — what the domain delivers and the impact it has, not just how it's built.
An AI-native way of working — you build on frontier models and embed AI development tools (Claude Code, Cursor) as standard practice for everyone in your domain.