Senior Software Engineer

NegotiateAI • Menlo Park, CA

17h

About The Position

NegotiateAI (Menlo Ventures Backed) is building AI for category managers at manufacturing and industrial companies, aiming to streamline indirect spend and deliver significant savings. The company's long-term vision is to develop general procurement AI that covers the entire procurement function. This role is for individuals excited about tackling complex technical challenges and contributing to a transformative product from its early stages.

You will be among the first engineers on the team, responsible for developing the core systems that power the AI-driven procurement platform. This position involves end-to-end ownership of significant product components and close collaboration with the founder and early customers to define product direction. It is a hands-on role with technical leadership responsibilities, but without direct reports.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of shipping production systems end to end.
• Strong backend engineering skills, including API design and data pipeline work.
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs in production, including agentic workflows, tool use, context and retrieval strategies, and evaluation.
• Experience shipping against messy real-world data: cleaning, normalization, entity resolution, and establishing ground truth.
• Comfortable with cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP) and standard production practices: CI/CD, testing, and observability.
• Product sense. You can take an ambiguous problem, talk to a customer, and decide what's actually worth building.
• A drive to improve developer experience and team velocity in the AI era, through internal tooling and agent-assisted workflows.
• Comfort with early-stage ambiguity: a small team, shifting priorities, and shipping before everything is fully specified.

Nice To Haves

• Deep production experience with TypeScript.
• Experience designing agent harnesses: the scaffolding that makes a model reliable in production.
• Experience with ClickHouse, or with other columnar analytics stores such as BigQuery, Snowflake, or Databricks.
• Experience integrating with enterprise systems such as SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, Coupa, or Ariba.
• Background in procurement, supply chain, sourcing, or marketplace software.
• Experience meeting SOC 2, GDPR, or similar compliance requirements at a startup.
• Experience at an early-stage startup (seed through Series B).
• Experience across both B2B and B2C, with a sense of how to make enterprise software feel consumer-grade.

Responsibilities

• Build and own core backend services, including integrations with ERP systems, supplier databases, and spend analytics tools.
• Build the agentic systems at the core of the product: pipelines that categorize indirect spend and resolve part identifiers from incomplete supplier data, and agents that source online benchmarks, gather supplier contacts, and support automated negotiation.
• Ship customer-facing features for real-time spend visibility and supplier benchmarking, and iterate quickly on customer feedback.
• Build evaluation and monitoring for our AI systems so we can measure accuracy and catch regressions before customers do.
• Set architectural direction for the systems you own, and mentor engineers earlier in their careers.
• Apply security and data privacy practices, including anonymization, tokenization, and secure sandboxes for model work.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed