Staff Engineer

Recruiting From Scratch•San Francisco, CA

7d•Onsite

About The Position

Our client is building a real-time people-data platform that provides deep context on individuals to power intelligent agents and next-generation applications. The platform dispatches tens of millions of autonomous AI agents across the open web to collect unique signals including GitHub activity, social posts, professional updates, company changes, career movements, and other difficult-to-capture behavioral data. These signals are connected at the individual level, creating a structured knowledge graph that spans hundreds of millions of websites and enables applications to reason about people using rich, real-time context. The platform is used by recruiting teams to identify and qualify talent with greater precision and by growth teams to uncover buyer intent and identify high-value prospects. The company is an extremely early-stage, founder-led organization with a small technical team and approximately $5.5M in funding. Engineers work directly with the CEO and CTO and have significant ownership over foundational infrastructure and technical strategy. As a Staff Engineer, you'll play a pivotal role in building the core agent infrastructure, scaling production systems, and shaping the technical architecture that will support the company's growth toward Series A. This is a high-leverage opportunity for an experienced engineer who enjoys ambiguity, first-principles problem solving, and building systems from the ground up.

Requirements

10+ years of professional software engineering experience
Strong track record of shipping production software
Experience designing and operating large-scale production systems
Experience building distributed systems and high-throughput infrastructure
Experience owning complex technical projects end-to-end
Experience working with APIs and backend infrastructure
Experience building AI, LLM, or agent-powered systems preferred
Experience working with large-scale data systems and pipelines
Experience working with cloud infrastructure and Linux environments
Experience operating in early-stage or high-growth startups preferred
Strong architecture and system design experience
Experience working closely with technical founders or senior leadership preferred
Strong ownership mentality and demonstrated technical leadership
Comfortable operating independently with minimal structure
Strong first-principles problem-solving approach
Experience building systems from the ground up
Strong backend software engineering fundamentals
Strong experience designing and operating production APIs
Strong experience building distributed systems and microservices
Strong understanding of database architecture and optimization
Experience with large-scale data pipelines
Experience working with Linux servers and production environments
Experience with AWS, GCP, or comparable cloud infrastructure
Experience building scalable and reliable cloud systems
Experience with LLMs and AI-powered workflows preferred
Experience building AI agent infrastructure preferred
Experience designing knowledge graphs or large-scale data architectures preferred
Strong understanding of system performance and optimization
Experience managing high-throughput production workloads
Strong understanding of reliability, observability, and production operations
Experience with database performance optimization
Strong API architecture and integration experience
Strong software architecture and system design capabilities
Ability to build maintainable, production-grade software
Strong debugging and performance engineering skills
Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or related technical field preferred
Strong computer science and software engineering fundamentals
Equivalent practical engineering experience accepted
Exceptional engineering ownership
Strong first-principles thinking
Excellent problem-solving ability
High execution velocity
Comfortable operating in extreme ambiguity
Strong technical judgment
Excellent communication skills
Comfortable working directly with founders
Strong product and business intuition
Bias toward action
Low-ego collaborative mentality
Comfortable working in a very small engineering organization
Strong sense of ownership over production systems
Comfortable making architectural decisions independently
Strong technical curiosity
Willingness to contribute beyond a narrowly defined engineering role
Comfortable operating in a high-intensity startup environment
Strong desire to build systems from scratch
Founder mentality and high agency

Nice To Haves

Experience building AI, LLM, or agent-powered systems
Experience operating in early-stage or high-growth startups
Experience working closely with technical founders or senior leadership
Experience with LLMs and AI-powered workflows
Experience building AI agent infrastructure
Experience designing knowledge graphs or large-scale data architectures
Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or related technical field

Responsibilities

Design, build, and operate core infrastructure powering people-data and agent platforms
Build production APIs supporting high-volume AI and data workloads
Develop LLM-powered workflows and autonomous agent infrastructure
Build and maintain large-scale scraping and data collection systems
Design and operate large-scale knowledge graph architecture
Architect production-grade systems capable of handling millions of API requests
Optimize system performance, reliability, and infrastructure costs
Build highly scalable distributed systems and microservices
Develop reliable data pipelines supporting large-scale people-data infrastructure
Operate production systems across cloud and Linux server environments
Design and maintain database architectures optimized for large-scale data workloads
Own technical projects end-to-end from ambiguous problem definition through deployment and iteration
Identify technical problems independently and develop first-principles solutions
Ship quickly while maintaining production reliability and system integrity
Collaborate directly with the CEO and CTO on technical strategy and architecture
Influence roadmap priorities and foundational engineering decisions
Help define long-term technical architecture as the company scales
Contribute broadly across the engineering organization and company
Build developer documentation, technical tutorials, and internal tooling
Develop experimental systems and prototypes to showcase and stress-test APIs
Establish strong engineering practices across architecture, reliability, and development
Operate with high agency in a fast-moving, early-stage environment