Staff Software Engineer

Staff Software Engineers: Let 250+ Companies Compete For You. Fonzi is an AI recruiting company. No job boards. No recruiter spam. Companies request to interview you and submit salary bids upfront. Every week, hiring managers at 250+ pre‑vetted startups in NYC and San Francisco review a curated group of engineers. They're reading profiles optimized by our team to surface what matters: what you've built, how you think about systems, and whether you're the kind of engineer who ships. Companies on Fonzi are Applied AI startups, Frontier labs, Hypergrowth startups, PE firms starting lean AI teams and more. They're backed by investors like A16z, Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Y Combinator and more.

How It Works

• 5‑minute application – we reach out, learn what you're building and what excites you, and 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.
• Completely free. We have an iMessage agent + humans in the loop you can text anytime with questions or requests to help handle scheduling and coordination.

Who We're Looking For

• Staff engineers who 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 the 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 experience at at least one high‑growth company.

What You'll Build

• 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 10× 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 $350,000+ base salary depending on experience and role. Many positions include meaningful equity at pre‑seed through Series B stage companies.

The Interview Process (Typical)

• 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.
• If you want to be the engineer who shapes how a company builds, we want to hear from you.