About the Role
This is a senior, foundational engineering role. The architecture, standards, and systems built now are the ones the rest of
the company will be built on. You'll operate with full autonomy — in a team this small, your judgment directly shapes the
product, the codebase, and the company's trajectory.
Responsibilities
• Architect and build the core backend and platform from the ground up — the foundational systems everything else
depends on.
• Design and ship LLM agents that reason over large, messy, real-world organizational data, and make them reliable
enough to trust.
• Make the foundational calls — architecture, infrastructure, data, tooling — and set the bar for engineering quality on
the team.
• Operate with full autonomy, owning problems end to end in a small, high-leverage team.
Must-Haves
• Years of experience building and operating backend and platform systems at real scale — the person your team
turned to for the hardest problems.
• Deep expertise in Python, distributed/platform systems, API design, and SQL data stores; comfortable owning systems
end to end, from design through production.
• A track record of leading ambiguous, high-impact projects end to end — setting technical direction, not just executing
against someone else's.
• Hands-on experience (or strong, fast-forming intuition) with LLMs, agentic frameworks, and RAG, with a feel for
building dependable products on top of nondeterministic models.
• Genuine excitement for the scope, pace, and consequence of an early-stage company over the structure of a large
one.
• Has owned and operated systems at meaningful scale at a strong engineering org — Staff / Senior Staff /
Principal-level scope, even if the title varies. Scope and impact matter more than tenure or a year count.
• Example signal: Staff/Senior/Principal at Databricks, Snowflake, Google, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe,
Notion, Ramp, Scale AI — or an early/senior founding engineer at a reputable VC-backed startup.
• Most experience should come from fast-moving tech environments, not banks/financial companies, slow-moving
non-tech, telecom, or transportation/government.
• Has been a technical anchor — sets direction, makes the hard architectural calls, and unblocks others.
• High drive for problem-solving, with a deep, first-principles approach to any challenge taken on.
• Strong agency and independence — comfortable defining the problem as well as solving it.
• Genuinely excited (not just willing) to work in a fast-paced, high-ownership, early-stage environment.
• Backend depth — building robust production systems, APIs, and Python — is important.
Nice to Have
• Previous founder, founding-member, or intrapreneur experience.
• Drawn to new, ambiguous problems with no clear solution.
• Fluent with AI tools for research and writing high-quality code.
• Experience with LLMs, AI agents, and making sense of large or heterogeneous data.
• An obsession with details and strong product sense.
• Strong written and verbal communication.
What We're Looking For (Screening Snapshot)
• 5+ years of experience at the Staff / Senior Staff / Principal level.
• Was operating at a senior level even before AI-assisted coding tools became standard.
• 3–5 years at a high-bar software engineering company (e.g., FAANG, Ramp, or similar).
• Some startup experience is ideal, though not required.
• Excellent communication skills.
