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Jobs · Information Technology · California

Staff Software Engineer - $200K - $300K

Fonzi AI · San Francisco Bay Area · 4 days ago
On-siteInformation Technology$200k–$300k/yrFull-time

About Fonzi

Fonzi is an AI recruiting company that connects staff software engineers with 250+ pre-vetted startups in New York City and San Francisco. Instead of job boards or recruiter spam, hiring managers review curated cohorts of engineers each week and request interviews with candidates they want. Companies submit competing salary bids directly to you upfront, and you only interview where you're genuinely interested. The service is completely free for engineers and includes an iMessage agent plus human support for scheduling and coordination.

Companies on Fonzi include Applied AI startups, frontier labs, hypergrowth startups, and PE firms building lean AI teams, backed by investors such as a16z, Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator.

How It Works

  • 5-minute application — we learn what you're building and what excites you, then optimize your profile
  • Hiring managers review the cohort and request interviews with candidates they want
  • Companies submit competing salary bids directly to you
  • You only interview where you're genuinely interested

Who We're Looking For

Staff engineers who do best on Fonzi typically:

  • Have set the technical direction for systems that serve real users at scale
  • Lead through architecture, code review, and mentorship while still shipping code themselves
  • Have led projects across teams and made hard tradeoffs on reliability, speed, and cost
  • Are using AI in how they build and know how to design systems around LLMs
  • Thrive in startup environments where the problem is ambiguous and the team is small
  • Have 7–12 years of experience, ideally with at least one high-growth company

What You'll Build

The companies on Fonzi are working on:

  • Core platforms and architectures that carry a startup from product–market fit to scale
  • AI-native products where LLMs, agents, and retrieval sit at the center of the system
  • Distributed systems, data infrastructure, and APIs built to handle 10x growth
  • Engineering standards and teams, as the senior technical voice next to the founders
  • Systems trusted by enterprise customers in fintech, healthcare, and legal

Compensation

$200,000 to $300,000+ base salary depending on experience and role. Many positions include meaningful equity at pre-seed through Series B stage companies.

Interview Process

  • Screening conversation looking for communication skills, cultural fit, and technical leadership
  • System design deep-dive on architecting a real system end-to-end
  • Coding or pairing session, plus a conversation on how you've led teams and projects

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