Staff / Senior Engineer
- San Francisco, California, United States
- Full-Time
- On-Site
- 225,000-300,000 USD / Year
Job Description:
Staff / Senior Engineer
San Francisco, CA · On-site (5 days) · Full-time
Compensation: $225,000–$300,000 + 0%–3% equity
About the Company
A San Francisco–based, seed-stage AI startup helping enterprises move AI from prototype to reliable production — embedding with customers, auditing their operations, and building the agents, integrations, and workflows that transform how those businesses run. The founding thesis: the hardest part of enterprise AI isn’t the model, it’s deployment, reliability, and trust.
Founded 2026 · 11–50 people · Industry: AI Tools
The Role
Lead the platform’s technical direction — design the architecture, set engineering standards, and own the build-vs-buy decisions that determine the company’s trajectory. This is the person defining the system, not a senior IC inside someone else’s org. Direct path to CTO.
What you’ll be doing
- Own the technical architecture: agent orchestration, process-mining infrastructure, diagnostic pipelines, and the control plane that turns audit outputs into deployed AI systems
- Architect compound AI systems running inside Fortune 5000 environments: multi-step agents, retrieval pipelines, evaluation frameworks, human-in-the-loop governance
- Set the engineering pace — the company ships to production weekly, not quarterly; drive velocity, cut scope ruthlessly
- Recruit, mentor, and lead engineers; set code-review standards, establish process, and build a team that scales from 5 to 50
- Bridge research and production: stay current on foundation models, agent frameworks, inference optimization, tool use, and long-context reasoning, and translate what’s useful into production
Tech stack: Agent orchestration, retrieval pipelines, evaluation frameworks; infrastructure depth (Kubernetes, distributed systems, cloud) a plus.
Requirements
- Production AI/ML systems: inference, orchestration, evaluation, monitoring
- High agency, ownership mentality
- SF Financial District, 5 days in-person
Green Flags
- Real, deep understanding of how scale actually works in production.
- Can architect on a whiteboard without leaning on slides.
- Has shipped production systems they personally designed.
- Strong opinions, easily updated when shown they’re wrong.
- Visible curiosity about agent and AI infrastructure specifically.
- Capable of being CTO in a few months
Red Flags
- Title says “staff” but they’ve only ever consumed abstracted infra.
- Can’t code live in the interview.
- Hand-wavy on scalability (“we’d just use Kubernetes”).
- Ego that won’t compress to a 10-person team.
- Coast mode from a comfortable big-tech role.
- No background at a top AI lab or as a founding/senior engineer at an AI-native startup.
- Significantly outside 6+ years engineering with 2+ years in a staff, principal, or founding role (years of experience isn’t a hard filter — recent company quality and demonstrated output matter more).
Why Join
- Founding-team scope and ownership of the entire technical vision, with a direct path to CTO
- Build a platform, not features — every client deployment compounds the product
- 100% production deployment rate with immediate, measurable impact
- Direct access to Fortune 5000 decision-makers