Senior Software Engineer

  • San Francisco, California, United States
  • Full-Time
  • On-Site
  • 180,000-280,000 USD / Year
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Job Description:

About the Company

Our client is a venture-backed startup building enterprise-grade AI agents that automate high-stakes contract and document workflows for some of the world's largest companies. The founding team recently joined a major enterprise-software organization through an acquisition, so you get the ownership and pace of an early-stage team with the distribution and resources of a much larger business behind it. Leadership has deliberately kept the group operating in high-velocity startup mode, with its own engineering, product, and go-to-market functions. This is a small, founder-led team with real influence over the product.

Early-stage, founder-led team, venture-backed and recently acquired. Industry: AI, Enterprise Software, Legal Tech.

The Role

We are hiring a Senior Software Engineer to own AI and agentic backend and infrastructure work end to end, reporting directly to the founders. The work is greenfield: you will architect core systems from scratch and own the security-critical pieces that enterprise customers depend on, including SOC 2 controls, encryption and key management, customer-held encryption keys (BYOK), and the infrastructure that AI agents run on. There is meaningful cloud infrastructure and DevOps work alongside the backend build.

What you'll be doing

  • Architect and build core features from scratch with a focus on reliability, scalability, and security.
  • Own security requirements: SOC 2 controls, encryption and key management, access controls, and customer BYOK.
  • Design and secure the infrastructure that AI agents run on, and build and deploy AI-powered agents in Python.
  • Build robust agent workflows that integrate LLMs, APIs, databases, business systems, and external tools.
  • Stand up and scale cloud infrastructure (AWS or Azure), including a meaningful DevOps component.
  • Establish engineering best practices, tooling, and culture as an early member of a small, high-impact team.

Tech stack: Python (ML and agentic infrastructure), AWS or Azure with DevOps, JavaScript/TypeScript, LLM-powered agents, agent orchestration and MCP.

Requirements

  • 5+ years building and shipping production backend systems.
  • A track record of shipping production systems in a startup or other high-ownership environment.
  • Time spent at a small startup (under 100 people) as a founder, founding engineer, or early hire.
  • Experience designing or implementing security-sensitive systems such as encryption, key management, and authentication.
  • Hands-on experience building or deploying AI/ML or LLM-powered agents in production.
  • Strong, production-grade Python for ML and agentic infrastructure.
  • Cloud infrastructure experience with AWS or Azure, including DevOps.
  • Production experience with JavaScript or TypeScript.
  • Ability to build agentic systems end to end and reason about agent orchestration and MCP at a systems-design level.
  • High agency: you self-direct, identify problems, and solve them independently.
  • Comfort translating ambiguous enterprise security requirements into concrete systems.
  • Willing to work on-site 5 days per week in New York or San Francisco.

Nice to Haves

  • Experience at a larger, established technology company alongside your startup chapters, for balance.
  • Background building or securing systems in a regulated domain (for example fintech or health tech).

Why Join

  • Report directly to the founders with a real seat at the table and no layers of management.
  • Greenfield ownership: architect and build core systems from scratch with full control over technical decisions.
  • Security and AI agent work that genuinely matters, shipped for some of the world's largest enterprises.
  • Startup energy and ownership paired with enterprise-scale distribution and resources.
  • A wide-open market at an inflection point, with a team carrying deep AI and commercial-contracting experience.

Details

  • Location: New York, NY or San Francisco, CA
  • Work policy: On-site, 5 days per week
  • Compensation: $180,000 to $280,000 plus equity
  • Visa sponsorship: Open to relocation and to transferring existing US work visas (for example H-1B or OPT transfers); new visa sponsorship is not available.
  • Employment type: Full-time