Staff Platform 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 Platform Engineer

Location: Redwood City, CA
Company Stage of Funding: Series A / Agentic AI + Enterprise HR Technology Startup
Office Type: Hybrid (2 days/week in Redwood City, CA)
Salary: $200,000 - $250,000 Base
Equity: Competitive Equity
Bonus: Competitive total compensation package
Visa: H1B Transfer and TN-1 supported (No new H1B sponsorship)
Company Description

Our client is building the next generation of agentic AI infrastructure for enterprise organizations.

The company develops AI agents that automate complex business workflows, improve employee productivity, and enable seamless human-AI collaboration across large organizations.

Founded in 2021 and led by the founding team behind Glint (acquired by LinkedIn), the company combines deep expertise in enterprise software, AI systems, and organizational technology.

Raised approximately $55M from top-tier investors including Norwest Venture Partners, True Ventures, and Shasta Ventures.

Recognized as one of the most innovative companies in HR technology and creator of Harper, an award-winning AI HR generalist platform.

The company is rebuilding HR infrastructure from the ground up with AI-native architecture rather than layering AI onto legacy software.

The platform combines:

• Agentic AI systems
• Multi-agent orchestration
• Memory architectures
• Retrieval systems
• LLM evaluation frameworks
• Human-in-the-loop workflows
• Enterprise automation
• AI-powered business process infrastructure

Engineering challenges involve building reliable production-grade AI systems, scalable distributed architectures, agent orchestration frameworks, memory systems, evaluation platforms, and enterprise workflow automation infrastructure.

The company is at a stage where engineers can have significant technical ownership while benefiting from strong product-market fit, substantial funding, and an experienced founding team.

The culture values technical excellence, ownership, collaboration, experimentation, and AI-native engineering practices.
What You Will Do

• Build scalable agentic orchestration frameworks for enterprise workflow automation
• Develop AI infrastructure that integrates with complex enterprise systems
• Design and implement memory architectures and advanced retrieval systems
• Build systems that provide persistent context across multi-step agent workflows
• Develop AI harnesses focused on evaluation, reliability, observability, and reasoning quality
• Improve prompt optimization, hallucination reduction, and context management systems
• Design backend infrastructure powering multi-agent workflows
• Build human-in-the-loop systems that enable seamless human-AI collaboration
• Develop tooling for rapid experimentation and deployment of AI workflows
• Build distributed systems supporting large-scale enterprise AI applications
• Design scalable microservice architectures for AI-native platforms
• Work on vector database infrastructure and retrieval pipelines
• Implement asynchronous and parallel processing systems
• Drive architectural decisions across platform engineering initiatives
• Mentor engineers and provide technical leadership across projects
• Collaborate closely with product and engineering teams
• Help define long-term technical strategy and platform architecture
• Operate as a senior individual contributor with significant ownership
• Build production-grade AI systems that serve enterprise customers at scale

Ideal Candidate Background

• 7-15 years of experience in platform engineering, backend infrastructure, or distributed systems engineering
• Current Staff Engineer or equivalent technical leadership experience
• Experience leading architecture and technical execution across engineering teams
• Strong distributed systems and platform engineering expertise
• Experience building production-grade AI or GenAI systems
• Strong proficiency in Python or Java
• Hands-on experience using AI tools in daily engineering workflows
• Experience with microservices architectures
• Experience with vector databases and retrieval systems
• Experience building asynchronous and parallel processing systems
• Experience designing scalable backend infrastructure
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and system design skills
• Experience operating production systems at scale
• Ability to mentor engineers and influence technical direction
• Strong startup mindset and ownership mentality
• Experience working in both startup and scaled engineering environments preferred
• BS/MS in Computer Science or related technical field

Strong Signals

• Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, or Technical Lead experience
• Experience building agentic AI systems in production
• Experience with LLM orchestration frameworks
• Experience building AI evaluation and observability platforms
• Experience with retrieval systems, vector databases, and memory architectures
• Strong distributed systems background
• Experience with Kafka, event-driven systems, and asynchronous architectures
• Experience at companies such as Meta, OpenAI ecosystem companies, Decagon, Glean, Sierra, Harvey, or similar AI-native organizations
• Startup experience with significant technical ownership
• Experience building enterprise-scale infrastructure platforms
• Strong prompt engineering and AI workflow expertise
• Experience deploying AI systems into production environments
• Deep understanding of AI reliability and evaluation challenges
• Proven success driving architectural decisions as a senior IC
• Experience mentoring engineers without moving into management
• Strong interest in AI-native software development

Compensation and Benefits

• Base salary: $200,000 - $250,000
• Competitive equity package
• Opportunity to join a well-funded Series A AI company
• Significant ownership over platform architecture and technical direction
• Direct collaboration with experienced repeat founders
• Exposure to cutting-edge agentic AI and enterprise automation systems
• High autonomy and influence as a senior individual contributor
• Opportunity to define next-generation AI infrastructure
• Work alongside highly experienced engineering teams
• Hybrid work environment in Redwood City, CA
• Strong product-market fit and substantial company runway
• Opportunity to shape how AI is deployed across enterprise organizations

Why Join

This is an opportunity to build the foundational infrastructure powering enterprise agentic AI systems.

Rather than working on experimental AI projects, the company is deploying production-grade AI agents that automate real business workflows and create measurable customer impact.

You'll work alongside experienced founders who have previously built and exited successful enterprise software companies while helping define how AI-native organizations operate at scale.

The role offers a rare combination of distributed systems engineering, AI infrastructure, platform architecture, technical leadership, and startup impact.

If you enjoy building large-scale platforms, architecting production AI systems, mentoring engineers, and operating in high-ownership environments, this role offers exceptional scope and career upside.