Software Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE This is a full-stack software engineering role at a seed-stage AI platform company serving the hospitality industry, where AI agents handle guest communication and operations workflows at scale. You'll own meaningful pieces of the AI system end-to-end, from intent classification and knowledge retrieval through tool orchestration and response generation. The engineering team is flat, giving you real autonomy over design decisions and the systems you build. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Design and build response generation pipelines, including routers, orchestrators, and synthesizers that classify intent, assemble context, select tools, and decide when to send or escalate. - Develop knowledge retrieval systems that ground agent responses in accurate, current data despite messy real-world inputs. - Build tool orchestration layers that execute multi-step workflows reliably, including graceful handling of third-party API failures mid-conversation. - Create evaluation frameworks that measure quality against real conversations and catch regressions before they reach customers. - Implement observability and tracing that makes agent reasoning legible and trustworthy to non-technical support teams. - Design controls and interfaces that let support leads adjust agent behavior without writing code. - Extend the system to voice conversations with real-time transcription and the same tool-use capabilities as text. - Optimize for speed and cost through model routing, caching, and prompt refinement. - Own infrastructure, data pipelines, integrations, and API work that underpin the platform. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 3 or more years of experience building and shipping production systems that real users depend on. - Experience designing and debugging AI/ML systems in production, including retrieval pipelines, prompt engineering, or model orchestration. - Proficiency across multiple layers of the stack: backend, frontend, infrastructure, or data pipelines. - Experience building and evaluating retrieval systems such as knowledge bases, ranking, context validation, or semantic search. - Experience designing multi-step workflows, tool orchestration, or function-calling systems. - Experience building observability, tracing, or debugging tools for complex pipelines. - Proficiency in at least one backend language such as Python, Go, Rust, or Java. - Experience integrating with third-party APIs and handling failure modes in production. - Bonus: experience with real-time or low-latency systems, voice and transcription, model routing, or building configuration interfaces for non-technical users. - Candidates must be authorized to work in the US (no visa sponsorship). COMPENSATION & BENEFITS - Base salary: $130,000 to $220,000 annually - Equity: 0.20% to 1.20% - Comprehensive health insurance and 401(k) match LOCATION On-site in San Francisco, CA. This is not a remote role.