Staff Engineer

Sourgum is transforming the $100B+ waste and recycling industry through cutting-edge technology that makes waste removal simpler, smarter, and more cost-effective. Our innovative haulsourcing platform powers high-quality waste and recycling services for businesses at significantly lower costs—saving our customers an average of 20%. Leveraging proprietary datasets, an advanced operating system, and a carefully curated network of 5,000+ trusted vendors, we help companies of all shapes and sizes streamline their operations while advancing sustainability efforts. We're a fast-growing, venture-backed company (just closed our Series A!) on a mission to modernize an outdated industry — and we're just getting started. Our investors include Spark Capital, Founder Collective, Suffolk Technologies, 186 Ventures, and River Park Ventures, the same funds that backed category-defining companies like Slack, Anthropic, Uber, Venmo, and Amazon Pharmacy. If you're driven by the opportunity to build something groundbreaking, we'd love to meet you.

Location: Jersey City, NJ (Hybrid: 3 days in office, 2 remote) Compensation: $230K – $260K base • Offers Equity

THE TEAM

At Sourgum, we're building the operating system for the waste and recycling industry—bringing transparency, standardization, and accountability to a historically fragmented space. Our platform connects customers with a nationwide network of local operators, and our software runs the day-to-day business of the haulers themselves. Our engineering team is small, senior, and AI-native. Every engineer builds with AI coding agents every day, ships continuously, and owns outcomes end to end. We already run AI agents in production across customer service, sales, vendor relations, business intelligence, and engineering itself—including an agent that triages bug reports, finds the root cause in our code and data, and plans the fix.

THE ROLE

As Staff Engineer, Agent Platform & Quality, you will own the pipeline that lets AI agents build our software: a ready ticket goes in, coding agents build it, automated testing and evaluations check it, and it ships to production continuously. You'll make every engineer and every agent at Sourgum faster and safer. This is a hands-on staff role. You'll set the technical direction for how we build with agents, and you'll write and ship the code yourself. This role is ideal for engineers who love building the tools other engineers depend on, hold a high bar for quality, and want to define what an AI-native engineering team looks like.

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING

• Own our agent build pipeline, from a ready ticket to a coding agent's pull request to a production release, and be the expert the rest of the team turns to when tuning it

• Build the evaluations and automated checks that block a change when quality drops, replacing manual QA

• Move us to continuous deployment, with feature flags, gradual rollouts, and automatic rollback • Give every change a realistic test environment before it merges

• Monitor every agent run for quality, cost, and failures, with a fallback to people when needed

• Keep our agents safe around real customer data and real money

• Ship product features across the stack when the team needs it

THE QUALIFICATIONS YOU NEED

• Typically 8+ years of professional software engineering, with a track record of promotions or growing scope

• Deep backend and infrastructure experience: APIs, PostgreSQL, containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and AWS

• Production experience building or running LLM-powered systems and owning their quality • A history of building internal platforms or developer tooling that other engineers adopted • You build with AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or similar) every day and have clear opinions on how to make them reliable • Strong security instincts and comfort on a small team: you ship, review, deploy, and take on-call yourself

NICE TO HAVE

• Evaluation and tracing tools (for example Braintrust, LangSmith, OpenTelemetry)

• Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and agent tool design

• Payments or financial systems where correctness is critical

OUR STACK

TypeScript/Node.js and Go services; React on the web; Flutter for mobile; PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, and Redis; AWS (Kubernetes, Terraform); BigQuery and Metabase; Datadog. Our repo is set up for Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex.

BENEFITS

• Company stock options as part of your compensation package, giving you the opportunity to share in our company's success and build long-term financial growth.

• A positive and collaborative work environment with a focus on innovation and sustainability.

• Flexible/Unlimited PTO

• Comprehensive benefits package including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, LTD, Life Insurance, etc.), retirement plans (401K).

• Access to hundreds of gyms, studios, and wellness apps—all through one easy membership provided by your Wellhub.

• Yearly Personal Development Budget

• Opportunities for professional development and career advancement within a growing company.

• Hybrid: 3 days in office, 2 remote days