Senior Software Engineer

About the role

We're looking for people who thrive in ambiguity, move quickly, and love building zero-to-one products. You'll work end-to-end — from whiteboard to production — owning services, shaping architecture, and raising the bar for engineering excellence.

Responsibilities

• Build production-quality products and APIs — design and implement frontends, backend services, and cloud-native distributed systems with simplicity, performance, scalability, and maintainability; ship pragmatic REST, GraphQL, or gRPC interfaces with versioning, pagination, authnz, schema evolution, and backward compatibility.
• Rapid iteration with ownership and bias for action — iterate quickly with a bias for delivery, take autonomy in decision-making from day one, and adapt comfortably to a fast-paced, evolving codebase; own design, implementation, and production outcomes.
• Operate with extreme leverage and build guardrails — aggressively use modern AI tools (e.g., Claude) to accelerate development while maintaining correctness, reproducibility, and maintainability; write rigorous unit and integration tests, maintain meaningful coverage, and produce clear documentation — especially for AI-assisted code.
• Evolve the AI stack and make principled tradeoffs — prototype and productionize LLM-dependent features (prompt pipelines, retrievals, structured outputs, evals, guardrails, memory); understand when AI is the right tool versus simpler deterministic solutions, balancing latency, cost, and reliability.
• Distributed systems & cloud architecture — design and operate cloud-native systems with a solid understanding of scaling, failure modes, state management, consistency models, and graceful degradation.
• Collaborate with product and design — work closely to define roadmap and architecture, turn ambiguous problems into secure, compliant, and high-quality user experiences, and ensure alignment across teams.
• Mentor and influence teammates — guide through code reviews, design discussions, tech talks, and crisp documentation; promote high engineering standards and team growth.

Requirements

• 10–15 years of professional software engineering experience.
• Must be hands-on — this is not a fit for managers who are out of touch with the code.
• Currently reside in the SF Bay Area; relocation is not an option for this role.
• Willing to work from the Palo Alto office 5 days per week — this is an early-stage, in-person, collaborative environment.
• Strong cultural fit — including willingness to meet in person for initial interviews.
• Genuinely ready for a 0-to-1 opportunity, with the experience to back it up.

Qualifications

• Curiosity as a habit — you read release notes, try new runtimes and models, and build weekend prototypes for fun — a lot of your YouTube consumption is hacking and learning new technologies, and you enjoy figuring out what you don't know on your own.
• Self-driven — you find the problem behind the problem, align stakeholders, and land outcomes without hand-holding.
• Systems mindset — you think in SLOs, budgets (latency, cost, error), blast radius, and graceful degradation.
• API ergonomics — you care about naming, error design, rate limits, observability, generated SDKs, and docs that don't lie.
• Data foundations — you know when to pick Postgres vs. columnar vs. KV vs. vector; you've shipped schema migrations and zero-downtime deploys.
• LLM-practical — you've built RAG or agents in anger; you understand context windows, tokenization, evals, and prompt, tooling hygiene.
• Security instincts — you default to least privilege, tame secrets, and design auth flows that survive real traffic.

Skills

• Hands-on with vector DBs (e.g., FAISS, HNSW, Milvus, PGVector), embeddings pipelines, and hybrid ranking.
• Protocol-fluent — you actually enjoy HTTP/1.1 vs. HTTP/2/3 quirks, caching semantics, content negotiation, and idempotency.
• Experience with model hosting (self-hosted inference servers, serverless GPUs, or managed endpoints) and caching, streaming strategies.
• Frontend experience with modern TypeScript frameworks and component systems; accessibility and performance budgets.
• Prior startup experience or meaningful open-source contributions.

Benefits

Competitive compensation, meaningful equity, benefits, and strong long-term upside.

Pay

$200,000 – $300,000, commensurate with experience.

Schedule

In-office 5 days per week.