Chief / Staff Software Engineer
On-siteSan Francisco, California, United States
San Francisco, California, United StatesOn-siteFull TimeSenior LevelStartup
Full TimeSenior LevelStartup
Job Summary
Own a critical technical domain end-to-end, including agent runtime, voice AI, or data platforms, by architecting systems, writing production code, and making key trade-offs. Take ambiguous problems from first principles to production, set engineering standards, and review work to unblock senior engineers. Partner with founders and product leadership to shape AI-native financial services while building systems for real-world scale and reliability. Use frontier AI tools like Claude Code and Cursor daily. This role offers full ownership of a major product area within an agentic AI platform serving millions of users.
Required Qualifications
- 6–14 years of software engineering experience
- 8–12 years being a common sweet spot
- Evidence of owning a mission-critical system, platform or product end-to-end
- Strong 01 experience — you have taken something from an idea or ambiguous problem into production
- Experience building systems that reached real users and operated at meaningful scale
- Strong software engineering and systems-design fundamentals
- The ability to reason from first principles rather than relying on familiar patterns
- High learning velocity — you can enter an unfamiliar problem space and become productive quickly
- Experience in a high-growth startup, scale-up or similarly high-velocity environment
- Comfort working through ambiguity and changing requirements
- Deep, daily use of modern AI development tools
- A strong preference for building and technical ownership over people management
- Experience with agentic AI, conversational AI, voice AI, LLM systems, retrieval, evaluation, distributed systems, AI infrastructure or fintech
Desired Qualifications
- Staff Software Engineers
- Principal Engineers
- Senior Staff Engineers
- Technical Leads who remain highly hands-on
- Exceptional Senior Engineers ready to step into Staff-level ownership
- Hands-on technical founders or CTOs who never stopped building
- Python
- Node.js
- React
- Frontier foundation models
- Modern AI development tooling
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