Staff Software Engineer - AI Products & Technical Leadership

Job Description

Job Description

Staff Software Engineer – AI Products & Technical Leadership

Location: San Francisco, California
Employment Type: Full-time
Work Arrangement: Hybrid, 3 days per week in office
Salary: $210,000–$260,000 base
Equity: 1%–1.5%
Visa: Open to eligible visa transfers, including H-1B and OPT

About the Opportunity

A well-funded, seed-stage healthcare technology company is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to serve as the technical anchor of its small engineering team.

The company is building AI agents that automate clinical-trial workflows for research sites and drug sponsors. Its platform helps sites identify relevant trials, complete study activation, and manage ongoing trial operations more efficiently. It also gives pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies greater visibility into activity across their research sites.

The platform is already used by more than 400 clinical research sites, giving the company unusually strong traction for its stage. This engineer will help build new AI-powered products while establishing the technical standards, processes, and architecture needed to support the company's next phase of growth.

This is a hands-on individual-contributor role. You will write and review code daily, own products from ideation through production, and mentor three junior engineers as they develop their technical skills.

What You'll Do

• Own and build AI-powered products from initial concept through production launch.

• Develop LLM-powered features, AI agents, multi-step agentic workflows, and production evaluation systems.

• Architect and deliver full-stack applications across frontend, backend, infrastructure, and data pipelines.

• Serve as the technical lead and engineering anchor for a small, growing team.

• Write and review code daily while remaining directly involved in product development.

• Lead major engineering projects and coordinate work across other engineers.

• Mentor three junior engineers and help them understand what strong engineering looks like.

• Establish best practices for code quality, code review, testing, development workflows, and engineering processes.

• Partner closely with the CTO, product, customer success, founders, and customers to understand user needs and identify new product opportunities.

• Translate ambiguous clinical-trial and customer problems into reliable, scalable technical products.

• Help shape the company's engineering architecture, technical roadmap, and culture.

What We're Looking For

• Approximately 8–15 years of experience in full-stack product engineering.

• Experience serving as a tech lead or de facto technical anchor for an engineering team.

• A track record of leading major technical projects and coordinating the work of other engineers.

• Strong hands-on full-stack engineering capabilities across frontend, backend, and infrastructure; backend-leaning generalists are welcome.

• Recent experience launching LLM-powered features or AI agents into production, ideally within the last one to two years.

• Experience building zero-to-one, customer-facing products rather than working exclusively on deep infrastructure.

• Experience owning products through the full development lifecycle, from early ideation and architecture through deployment and iteration.

• Experience mentoring junior engineers and establishing effective practices for code quality, code review, and engineering processes.

• Strong cross-functional experience working with product managers, customer success teams, founders, or customers.

• The ability to operate effectively within a small, fast-moving team with limited bureaucracy and significant individual ownership.

• Willingness to work from the company's Financial District office in San Francisco every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday.

Strong Candidate Backgrounds

You may be especially well suited for this role if you have worked as:

• A Staff or Principal Software Engineer who remained deeply involved in hands-on product development.

• A founding engineer or early technical hire at a Seed through Series B startup.

• A technical lead responsible for both engineering execution and the development of junior team members.

• A full-stack product engineer who has built and launched LLM-powered products or AI agents.

• A backend-leaning generalist who can work across the complete product and infrastructure stack.

• An engineer with experience at both an early-stage startup and a larger technology company with mature engineering practices.

What Will Help You Stand Out

• Experience working in both early-stage startup environments and larger engineering organizations.

• Founding-engineer or early-hire experience.

• Experience building multi-step agentic pipelines.

• Experience establishing production AI evaluations or LLM observability systems.

• Experience with LangSmith, Braintrust, Weights & Biases, or comparable evaluation and observability tools.

• Strong experience with Python, TypeScript, React, SQL, and CI/CD.

• A computer science degree or equivalent professional experience.

• A demonstrated pattern of increasing technical ownership and responsibility throughout your career.

• Genuine interest in biotechnology, life sciences, healthcare, clinical research, or accelerating the development of new medicines.

Why Join

• Help solve one of the largest bottlenecks in medicine by making clinical trials faster and more efficient.

• Join a seed-stage company backed by more than $7 million in funding with a platform already used by over 400 research sites.

• Serve as the technical anchor of a small engineering team and directly influence how the organization operates and grows.

• Own meaningful AI-powered products from initial idea through production.

• Shape the company's engineering architecture, development practices, processes, and culture from the ground up.

• Work directly with the CTO, founders, customers, product, and customer success teams.

• Join a high-ownership, low-bureaucracy environment where engineers have a direct influence on company and product decisions.

• Receive a competitive base salary and meaningful early-stage equity.

Client Interview Process

• 30-minute introductory call

• Virtual system-design interview

• Final on-site interview consisting of technical and behavioral interviews and lunch with the team

• The complete interview process typically takes approximately two weeks and may be completed within one week when necessary