Staff Engineer - San Francisco

Eli•San Francisco, CA

23h•Hybrid

About The Position

Eli is building a better system to help utilities, government agencies, and their partners run energy programs. The platform assists with determining project eligibility, reviewing documentation, reporting results, and issuing payments. Eli also advances money to contractors before underlying rebates are paid, providing crucial cash flow. Since launching in December 2023, Eli has processed hundreds of thousands of projects and advanced nearly $50 million to contractors. The company is preparing to support a much larger volume of projects and capital. This role is based in San Francisco, with the possibility of being fully remote within the US for the right candidate. Due to compliance requirements, the role is open to US residents only.

Requirements

Strong engineering skills with the ability to debug from first principles, read error messages, and understand systems from browser to database.
Proficiency in using AI coding agents while remaining the author and understanding the code.
Ability to answer questions based on personal understanding and defend code in PRs.
Focus on solving problems rather than just closing tickets.
Understanding of and care for the business, including rebate programs, underwriting, and contractor payments.
Comfort and competence in compliance- and security-heavy environments (SOC 2 audited, handling personal and financial data).
Ability to write short, clear updates on progress, blockers, and timelines.
Strong opinions about tools and the ability to articulate their reasoning.
8+ years of experience building production software, ideally including time as the primary owner of a system during an outage.
Staff-level scope or equivalent impact, demonstrated by leading system design and maintaining accountability in production.
Deep TypeScript experience on the backend (Bun, Node, Next.js, tRPC, Prisma or similar).
Solid relational database skills in MySQL or Postgres, including schema design, query plans, and migrations.
A track record of taking on and completing work outside of assigned areas.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Temporal or another workflow engine.
Experience with payments, ledgers, lending, or reconciliation.
Experience with dbt, Snowflake, or other analytics tooling.
Experience evaluating LLM output with test sets and metrics.
Experience with infrastructure tools like Pulumi, Docker, Vercel, Tailscale.
Experience with monitoring tools like Datadog, Sentry.
Experience with energy programs or utility software.

Responsibilities

Set technical direction for systems where correctness is paramount, including money movement, AI-driven decisions, and the underlying platform.
Write and ship code regularly, with work appearing in production and customer-facing within days.
Take ownership of work, identifying and addressing tasks that need doing.
Determine what processors, contractors, and program administrators need, build the solutions, monitor their performance, and iterate.
Contribute to AI decisions for document verification, eligibility checks, and fraud detection, deciding on the appropriate use of models, rules, or human intervention and measuring effectiveness.
Manage money movement systems, including the ledger, the loan tape reported to lenders, and reconciliation against bank records, ensuring accuracy to the cent for audit purposes.
Improve internal tool stack by consolidating legacy systems like Airtable into agentic, in-house tools for operations and program configuration.
Maintain and improve the platform and production environment, including CI speed, test-suite health, backups, database migrations, alerts, and workflows. Investigate and resolve production issues.
Help shape the growth of the engineering team, including hiring decisions.