Chief / Staff Software Engineer

Chief/ Staff Software EngineerLocation: San Francisco, CA — 5 days in office preferred Employment: Full-time Compensation: Competitive + meaningful equity Remote: Considered for exceptional US-based candidates Visa: H1B transfers consideredThe OpportunityWe're hiring exceptional Staff / Principal-level engineers to take end-to-end ownership of major technical domains within a fast-growing agentic AI platform.This is not a traditional engineering management role.You will be a deeply hands-on technical leader who architects systems, writes production code, reviews critical work and sets the technical bar by doing the work yourself. You'll have the autonomy of a founding engineer while operating on a platform that already serves real customers at meaningful scale.Think of the role as being the technical owner of an entire product or platform domain — responsible not only for how it is built, but for whether it succeeds.You'll work directly with founders and product leadership, partner closely with a Domain PM, and help shape the next generation of AI-native financial services.What You Could OwnDepending on your technical strengths, you could take ownership of areas including:Agent runtime & intelligence — model orchestration, reasoning, retrieval, knowledge systems, evaluation and continuous-improvement loopsVoice & conversational AI — production AI agents across voice and chatAI-first contact centre systems — making human teams dramatically more capable through AIAgent actions & computer use — integrations and systems that allow agents to take real actions across external platformsAgent-building infrastructure — platforms and tooling for internal teams and customers to build and deploy agentsData platforms & fraud systems — shared data infrastructure, intelligence and cross-customer fraud detectionAI-native consumer products — experiences that understand users, make decisions and act on their behalfReliability & operations — high-scale systems that keep AI products fast, observable and dependableWe're looking for exceptional generalists with real depth. You do not need to fit neatly into one of these areas before joining.Own a critical technical domain end-to-endArchitect systems and make the most important technical trade-offsContinue to write and ship production codeTake ambiguous problems from first principles through to productionSet engineering standards for quality, reliability and velocityReview and unblock other senior engineers through technical credibilityPartner with product leadership on both technical direction and business outcomesBuild systems designed for real-world scale, reliability and customer usageHelp establish an AI-native engineering cultureUse frontier AI development tools such as Claude Code, Cursor and similar platforms as a core part of your engineering workflowRapidly learn unfamiliar technologies and domains when the problem requires itYou are likely to have 6–14 years of software engineering experience, with approximately 8–12 years being a common sweet spot.More importantly, your track record shows that you have already operated with significant technical ownership.Strong candidates may currently be:Staff Software EngineersPrincipal EngineersSenior Staff EngineersTechnical Leads who remain highly hands-onExceptional Senior Engineers ready to step into Staff-level ownershipHands-on technical founders or CTOs who never stopped buildingYou should have several of the following:Evidence of owning a mission-critical system, platform or product end-to-endStrong 01 experience — you have taken something from an idea or ambiguous problem into productionExperience building systems that reached real users and operated at meaningful scaleStrong software engineering and systems-design fundamentalsThe ability to reason from first principles rather than relying on familiar patternsHigh learning velocity — you can enter an unfamiliar problem space and become productive quicklyExperience in a high-growth startup, scale-up or similarly high-velocity environmentComfort working through ambiguity and changing requirementsDeep, daily use of modern AI development toolsA strong preference for building and technical ownership over people managementExperience with agentic AI, conversational AI, voice AI, LLM systems, retrieval, evaluation, distributed systems, AI infrastructure or fintech is highly relevant, but we will also consider outstanding engineers from adjacent technical domains.Our current environment includes:PythonNode.jsReactFrontier foundation modelsModern AI development toolingWe care more about strong engineering fundamentals, learning speed and evidence that you can take ownership of complex systems than whether you have used a particular framework before.Own something meaningfulYou will not be one of dozens of Staff Engineers responsible for a narrow slice of infrastructure.You will own a major technical domain outright and have meaningful influence over architecture, product direction and outcomes.This is not a research project or pre-product experiment.The underlying platform already powers AI experiences for financial institutions and millions of end users. What you build can reach real customers quickly.This is a senior technical career path built around technical credibility rather than headcount.Competitive compensation + meaningful equityFull benefits are provided.If you are a senior engineer who wants more ownership, harder technical problems and greater product impact without moving away from building, we'd like to hear from you.