Staff Engineer

CTO-Caliber Engineering Lead
Base salary: $200K to $300K plus equity
Location: New York, 4 days in person | Full time

If you have been a CTO but still want to build, this is a chance to put that range to work on a visible civic problem. Alexandria, Kentucky, reports weeks of fieldwork saved, and Port Lavaca, Texas, has used the product to support budget planning. You would help turn those early results into a platform that changes how cities understand and maintain their infrastructure.

We are hiring for a company building the operating layer for the infrastructure cities maintain. Roads are the starting point: imagery, vehicle data, GIS records, engineering documents, and local knowledge become a living map of assets and their condition. Public works teams can use that evidence to plan capital, explain priorities, and manage work. The longer ambition reaches sidewalks, drainage, signs, bridges, and other public assets.

The product has customers, revenue, and funding, while the engineering choices that define the next phase are still open. You would join a world-class engineering team that includes a founding software engineer formerly at Brex and a machine learning engineer formerly at X, Google's moonshot factory.

What you'll own

Be the founder's technical counterpart across product, architecture, quality, and the growing engineering team. You will make the hard calls, explain your reasoning, and stay close enough to code and customers to see when a decision needs to change.

• Set technical direction and build the most consequential systems.
• Connect customer needs to a focused roadmap and credible experiments.
• Define validation and human-review standards for noisy data.
• Own hiring standards, incidents, releases, and the trade-offs behind them.
  

Problems you'll solve

The platform must move quickly without asking cities to trust evidence it cannot explain. You will decide where automation creates value, where a human must review, and how to make those limits clear in the product.

Candidate fit

• You have been a CTO, founding engineer, or senior engineering leader.
• You can point to products you personally took into production.
• You disagree constructively with founders and commit after a decision.
• You can work in New York in person 4 days per week.
  

Role details

• Base salary: $200K to $300K, plus founding team equity.
• Full time, New York, 4 days in person.
• Work directly with the founder and a small engineering team.
• Core stack: React, TypeScript, Mapbox, Express, geospatial data, and practical infrastructure.
• Visa sponsorship has not been confirmed; please ask if this affects your search.
  

Apply

Tell us about a product you personally shipped, the customer problem it solved, the technical decisions you owned, and what happened when people used it. We are especially interested in how you handled imperfect information and what you changed after launch.

Exclusively represented by ⚡dynamism

This search is led exclusively by ⚡dynamism, a community of exceptional builders, founders, and investors that includes YC alumni, Thiel Fellows, and AI lab researchers. We connect ambitious engineers with career-defining roles at breakout companies backed by leading funds including Y Combinator, a16z, and Sequoia.

Learn more at sfdynamism.com.

If you believe you’re a particularly strong fit, email Richard directly at View email address on click.appcast.io.