Staff Engineer

ABOUT THE ROLE This is a high-ownership Staff Engineer role at a seed-stage AI and people-data company in San Francisco. You will be a foundational technical contributor, shaping core infrastructure and platform architecture at a critical early stage. The work directly influences the company's long-term technical direction. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Design, build, and operate core infrastructure for a people-data and agent platform, including APIs, LLM-powered workflows, scraping systems, and large-scale knowledge graph architecture. - Architect and maintain production-grade systems capable of handling millions of API requests, with a focus on performance, cost efficiency, and reliability across cloud and Linux server environments. - Own projects end-to-end, from ambiguous problem definition through deployment and iteration, shipping quickly without compromising system integrity. - Collaborate directly with senior leadership on technical decisions, roadmap priorities, and foundational architectural choices. - Contribute broadly across the stack, including developer documentation, technical tutorials, internal tooling, and experimental builds that showcase and stress-test APIs. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 10 or more years of professional software engineering experience shipping code to production at scale. - Hands-on experience with Linux servers in a production environment. - Experience with agent orchestration, LLMs, or web scraping. - Experience designing or operating APIs, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure (AWS or GCP), or high-volume data pipelines. - Demonstrated ability to take ambiguous projects from architecture through deployment and iteration with minimal oversight. - A degree in computer science or a closely related field from a well-regarded university. - Experience at a high-growth tech company or early-stage startup; previous founding experience is a plus. - Based in San Francisco and comfortable working on-site. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS Base salary in the range of $250,000 to $300,000 USD annually, plus equity. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role. LOCATION On-site in San Francisco, CA, United States.