Staff Engineer

Who is Recruiting from Scratch : Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers, software, and hardware talent at innovative companies. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across the United States to help them hire.

Staff Engineer

Location - San Francisco, CA (On-site) - Five days per week in-office in San Francisco, CA.

Compensation - $250,000 – $300,000 Base + Competitive Equity

Visa - US Citizens / Green Card Holders Only — No Visa Sponsorship or Transfers

Company Stage - Early Stage – $5.5M Funding

Industry - Artificial Intelligence, Data Infrastructure, Agentic AI, Software Development, Developer Infrastructure

About the Company

Our client is building a real-time people-data platform that provides deep context on individuals to power intelligent agents and next-generation applications.

The platform dispatches tens of millions of autonomous AI agents across the open web to collect unique signals including GitHub activity, social posts, professional updates, company changes, career movements, and other difficult-to-capture behavioral data.

These signals are connected at the individual level, creating a structured knowledge graph that spans hundreds of millions of websites and enables applications to reason about people using rich, real-time context.

The platform is used by recruiting teams to identify and qualify talent with greater precision and by growth teams to uncover buyer intent and identify high-value prospects.

The company is an extremely early-stage, founder-led organization with a small technical team and approximately $5.5M in funding. Engineers work directly with the CEO and CTO and have significant ownership over foundational infrastructure and technical strategy.

As a Staff Engineer, you'll play a pivotal role in building the core agent infrastructure, scaling production systems, and shaping the technical architecture that will support the company's growth toward Series A.

This is a high-leverage opportunity for an experienced engineer who enjoys ambiguity, first-principles problem solving, and building systems from the ground up.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and operate core infrastructure powering people-data and agent platforms
• Build production APIs supporting high-volume AI and data workloads
• Develop LLM-powered workflows and autonomous agent infrastructure
• Build and maintain large-scale scraping and data collection systems
• Design and operate large-scale knowledge graph architecture
• Architect production-grade systems capable of handling millions of API requests
• Optimize system performance, reliability, and infrastructure costs
• Build highly scalable distributed systems and microservices
• Develop reliable data pipelines supporting large-scale people-data infrastructure
• Operate production systems across cloud and Linux server environments
• Design and maintain database architectures optimized for large-scale data workloads
• Own technical projects end-to-end from ambiguous problem definition through deployment and iteration
• Identify technical problems independently and develop first-principles solutions
• Ship quickly while maintaining production reliability and system integrity
• Collaborate directly with the CEO and CTO on technical strategy and architecture
• Influence roadmap priorities and foundational engineering decisions
• Help define long-term technical architecture as the company scales
• Contribute broadly across the engineering organization and company
• Build developer documentation, technical tutorials, and internal tooling
• Develop experimental systems and prototypes to showcase and stress-test APIs
• Establish strong engineering practices across architecture, reliability, and development
• Operate with high agency in a fast-moving, early-stage environment

Ideal Candidate Background

Experience Requirements

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Strong track record of shipping production software
• Experience designing and operating large-scale production systems
• Experience building distributed systems and high-throughput infrastructure
• Experience owning complex technical projects end-to-end
• Experience working with APIs and backend infrastructure
• Experience building AI, LLM, or agent-powered systems preferred
• Experience working with large-scale data systems and pipelines
• Experience working with cloud infrastructure and Linux environments
• Experience operating in early-stage or high-growth startups preferred
• Strong architecture and system design experience
• Experience working closely with technical founders or senior leadership preferred
• Strong ownership mentality and demonstrated technical leadership
• Comfortable operating independently with minimal structure
• Strong first-principles problem-solving approach
• Experience building systems from the ground up

Technical Requirements

• Strong backend software engineering fundamentals
• Strong experience designing and operating production APIs
• Experience building distributed systems and microservices
• Strong understanding of database architecture and optimization
• Experience with large-scale data pipelines
• Experience working with Linux servers and production environments
• Experience with AWS, GCP, or comparable cloud infrastructure
• Experience building scalable and reliable cloud systems
• Experience with LLMs and AI-powered workflows preferred
• Experience building AI agent infrastructure preferred
• Experience designing knowledge graphs or large-scale data architectures preferred
• Strong understanding of system performance and optimization
• Experience managing high-throughput production workloads
• Strong understanding of reliability, observability, and production operations
• Experience with database performance optimization
• Strong API architecture and integration experience
• Strong software architecture and system design capabilities
• Ability to build maintainable, production-grade software
• Strong debugging and performance engineering skills

Education

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or related technical field preferred
• Strong computer science and software engineering fundamentals
• Equivalent practical engineering experience accepted

Soft Skills

• Exceptional engineering ownership
• Strong first-principles thinking
• Excellent problem-solving ability
• High execution velocity
• Comfortable operating in extreme ambiguity
• Strong technical judgment
• Excellent communication skills
• Comfortable working directly with founders
• Strong product and business intuition
• Bias toward action
• Low-ego collaborative mentality
• Comfortable working in a very small engineering organization
• Strong sense of ownership over production systems
• Comfortable making architectural decisions independently
• Strong technical curiosity
• Willingness to contribute beyond a narrowly defined engineering role
• Comfortable operating in a high-intensity startup environment
• Strong desire to build systems from scratch
• Founder mentality and high agency

Compensation & Benefits

• Base Salary: $250,000 – $300,000
• Competitive Equity Package
• Opportunity to join an extremely early-stage technical organization
• Significant ownership over core infrastructure and technical architecture
• Direct collaboration with CEO and CTO
• Opportunity to shape the company's technical strategy
• Opportunity to build large-scale AI agent infrastructure from the ground up
• Exposure to LLMs, autonomous agents, data infrastructure, and knowledge graphs
• High-impact engineering role with broad technical scope
• Opportunity to help shape the engineering organization ahead of Series A

Why Join

This is a rare opportunity to join an extremely early-stage AI and data company and help build the infrastructure powering the emerging agent economy.

You'll work on high-scale APIs, autonomous AI agents, web-scale data collection, knowledge graphs, distributed systems, and production infrastructure while operating directly alongside technical founders.

As one of the earliest senior engineers, you'll have significant influence over architecture, engineering standards, technical strategy, and the systems that will support the company's next stage of growth.

If you enjoy first-principles engineering, building complex infrastructure from scratch, solving difficult scaling problems, and operating with extreme ownership and autonomy, this role offers exceptional technical scope and impact.