Staff/Principal Software Engineer

Recruiting From Scratch•San Francisco, CA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Our client is building an AI-powered end-to-end go-to-market platform that helps sales, marketing, and revenue teams find prospects, engage customers, and close deals with greater intelligence and efficiency. The platform combines a massive B2B contact and company database with an AI-native suite of prospecting, engagement, sequencing, and revenue intelligence tools. More than 500,000 companies rely on the platform, with hundreds of thousands of users depending on its systems every day. The company is profitable and growing rapidly while undertaking a major AI-native rebuild of its product around AI agents and intelligent workflows. As a Staff or Principal Software Engineer, you'll operate as a high-leverage individual contributor responsible for technical direction, architecture, and some of the hardest engineering problems across the organization. This is an opportunity for a senior technical leader who has built and operated large-scale distributed systems and can move between high-priority projects while influencing engineering teams, product leadership, and executive stakeholders.

Requirements

8+ years of experience in backend or full-stack software engineering
Experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems
Experience designing systems that serve hundreds of thousands or millions of users
Strong experience owning production systems end-to-end
Experience working on complex, high-scale software platforms
Experience solving difficult architecture, scalability, reliability, or performance problems
Experience operating as a senior technical individual contributor
Experience influencing engineering direction across multiple teams
Experience partnering with senior engineering and product leadership
Experience working in high-bar engineering organizations
Strong track record of technical ownership and execution
Experience making architecture and infrastructure tradeoffs independently
Experience working on technically complex products with significant scale
Strong ability to operate across multiple high-priority engineering initiatives
Experience mentoring and raising the technical capabilities of other engineers
Strong product and business awareness
Ability to operate autonomously with limited direction
Experience working in fast-moving, high-growth technology companies
Strong backend software engineering fundamentals
Strong experience designing distributed systems
Experience with large-scale production systems
Strong system design and architecture capabilities
Experience with scalability, reliability, and performance engineering
Experience with production infrastructure and cloud environments
Strong understanding of databases and data-intensive systems
Experience with APIs and backend services
Strong coding and debugging skills
Ability to work across unfamiliar systems and codebases
Ability to quickly understand complex technical architectures
Ability to make pragmatic build-versus-buy decisions
Ability to balance engineering quality, speed, cost, and scalability
Strong understanding of software development lifecycle and production operations
Ability to use modern AI coding tools and agents effectively
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field preferred
Strong technical education preferred
Equivalent practical software engineering experience accepted
Exceptional technical ownership
Strong architectural and engineering judgment
High intellectual curiosity
Ability to solve highly ambiguous technical problems
Strong written and verbal communication
Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly
Strong cross-functional collaboration skills
Comfortable working with VPs and C-suite engineering leaders
Strong ability to influence without formal authority
High technical standards
Product-minded engineering approach
Strong business judgment
Ability to make difficult technical tradeoffs
Comfortable operating with significant autonomy
Strong mentoring and technical leadership ability
Low-ego collaboration style
Strong bias toward action and execution
Comfortable moving between different technical problems and projects
Strong accountability for production outcomes
Passion for building systems at significant scale
Comfortable in high-bar engineering environments
Excited about AI-native development and agentic engineering workflows
Strong continuous-learning mindset
Comfortable experimenting with new technologies
Strong ability to operate in fast-moving environments
Comfortable working onsite in San Francisco 3 days/week

Nice To Haves

Experience with distributed systems, search, data, infrastructure, or AI/agent-centric initiatives
Experience with search or large-scale data systems preferred
Experience with AI/ML or agent-centric systems preferred
Experience building AI-powered products preferred
Experience with AI-assisted development workflows
Experience with containerization and orchestration technologies
Experience with Kubernetes and Docker preferred
Experience with cloud platforms such as GCP preferred
Experience with infrastructure-as-code such as Terraform preferred
Experience with Elasticsearch or comparable search technologies preferred
Experience with MongoDB or other distributed databases preferred

Responsibilities

Own the architecture and technical direction for significant areas of the platform
Lead the design and development of large-scale distributed systems
Work on agent-centric AI products and AI-native product architecture
Solve the most technically complex engineering problems across the organization
Make critical build-versus-buy, architecture, infrastructure, and cost tradeoffs
Design systems capable of serving hundreds of thousands of users at scale
Drive technical strategy across multiple engineering teams
Establish engineering standards, patterns, and best practices
Raise the technical bar across the engineering organization
Multiply the output and effectiveness of engineers around you
Partner closely with engineering leadership on technical direction
Collaborate with product leadership to align technical architecture with business goals
Work closely with VPs and C-suite engineering leaders on high-priority initiatives
Own systems end-to-end from design through production deployment and operation
Diagnose and solve complex scalability, reliability, and performance challenges
Contribute directly to architecture and implementation of critical systems
Move between high-priority technical projects based on organizational needs
Evaluate emerging technologies and determine where they can provide meaningful leverage
Use AI-assisted development as a first-class part of the engineering workflow
Leverage AI agents to accelerate design, investigation, debugging, and implementation
Help drive the company's broader transition toward AI-native engineering workflows
Build highly reliable and scalable backend systems
Contribute to distributed systems, search, data, infrastructure, or AI/agent-centric initiatives
Work across teams to solve cross-cutting engineering challenges
Operate with extreme ownership over correctness, performance, reliability, and technical outcomes
Make independent technical decisions in a fast-moving engineering organization
Mentor and influence engineers through technical leadership rather than formal management
Help shape the long-term architecture and engineering direction of the company

Benefits

15% Target Bonus
Competitive Equity Package
AI tooling budget for engineering development
Opportunity to work on large-scale systems serving hundreds of thousands of users
High technical ownership and autonomy
Opportunity to influence architecture across a large engineering organization
Direct exposure to VPs and C-suite engineering leadership
Opportunity to work on an AI-native rebuild of a major B2B platform
Exposure to agentic AI and modern AI-assisted development workflows
Strong engineering culture with high technical standards
Growth and career development support
Hybrid work flexibility in San Francisco