Chief Engineer (Principal Engineer)

Recruiting From Scratch•San Francisco, CA

1d•Onsite

About The Position

The Chief Engineer (Principal Engineer) is a highly hands-on senior technical leader at a profitable, venture-backed AI company building agentic AI solutions for financial services. The company’s platform combines conversational AI, large language models, and autonomous agents to modernize customer experiences and automate complex workflows across voice, digital, and employee-assisted channels in a regulated environment. The role owns a critical engineering domain end to end, from architecture and technical direction through execution, production deployment, and scale. The Chief Engineer will build and ship production code, set technical standards, guide engineers and technical leads, and take responsibility for company-critical systems. Working closely with the founders, engineering leadership, product leadership, and the Domain Product Manager, this person will influence company-level technical decisions and help shape the long-term technical roadmap. The position also contributes to AI runtimes, agentic systems, conversational AI, and other advanced AI capabilities. It involves making considered decisions about LLM integration, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluation, reliability, and production performance, while helping establish an AI-native engineering culture using tools such as Claude Code and Cursor. The role is based on-site in San Francisco five days per week.

Requirements

At least 10 years of software engineering experience.
Experience operating at Principal, Distinguished Engineer, Staff+ or hands-on technical founder level.
A strong track record building and owning complex production systems at meaningful scale.
Experience taking a technically challenging or ambiguous initiative from zero to one.
Experience owning a company-critical system or technical domain on which other teams and products depend.
Deep technical credibility in AI, LLMs, agentic systems, or other advanced AI technologies.
Daily hands-on use of frontier development tools such as Claude Code and Cursor.
Strong system design, architecture, and software engineering fundamentals.
Ability to write, review, and ship production code while providing technical direction to other engineers.
Experience guiding engineers and technical leads without moving into a purely managerial role.
Strong judgment and ability to operate independently in high-ambiguity environments.
Experience working in a startup or high-growth technology company.
Based in or willing to relocate to San Francisco and comfortable working on-site five days per week.

Nice To Haves

Experience building conversational AI, voice AI, or agentic AI systems.
Experience developing production LLM applications or AI runtimes.
Experience with RAG architectures, AI evaluation systems, and agent orchestration.
Fintech or financial services experience.
Experience building technology for regulated industries.
Experience working with banks, credit unions, or other financial institutions.
Experience as a founding engineer or early technical leader at a high-growth startup.
Experience leading a major product or infrastructure initiative from zero to one.
Experience establishing technical standards across multiple engineering teams.
Experience working closely with founders and senior product leadership.

Responsibilities

Own a core engineering domain, including its architecture, technical direction, engineering standards, and measurable outcomes.
Drive complex and ambiguous technical initiatives from initial concept through production deployment and scale.
Architect and build production systems supporting critical business and product capabilities.
Make high-impact technical decisions and establish engineering standards followed by other teams.
Identify architectural bottlenecks, improve reliability, and drive technical improvements across the domain.
Take responsibility for company-critical systems relied on by other engineers and product teams.
Write, review, and ship production code alongside the engineering team.
Lead through technical contribution and guide or unblock engineers and technical leads.
Review architecture, code, and technical decisions while maintaining high standards for quality and velocity.
Mentor engineers and strengthen the technical capabilities of the wider organization.
Partner with engineering and product leadership to prioritize initiatives and deliver business outcomes.
Build and evolve AI-powered systems using frontier models, agentic architectures, and modern AI development tools.
Help establish an AI-native engineering culture and standardize tools such as Claude Code and Cursor.
Contribute to the architecture of AI runtimes, agentic systems, conversational AI, and other advanced AI capabilities.
Make decisions about LLM integration, RAG, evaluation, reliability, and production performance.
Explore technical approaches and translate advances in AI into reliable, scalable products.
Participate in technical leadership discussions alongside the founders and contribute to company-level engineering decisions.
Partner with the Domain Product Manager to define priorities and drive measurable product and business outcomes.
Shape the technical roadmap across major product and infrastructure initiatives.
Lead technical execution across multiple engineering pods and influence organizational approaches to architecture, AI development, quality, and delivery.