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Staff Software Engineer / Technical Lead

150k – 250kSan Francisco, CAEngineering ManagementOnsite7+ YOE
Summary

Hands-on technical leader providing architecture guidance, mentoring engineers, and contributing to infrastructure, backend, APIs, and ML systems at an early-stage AI drug discovery startup.

About the role

What You'll Do

  • Partner with the CTO on architecture, technical planning, and major engineering initiatives
  • Provide technical guidance across a team of 7-8 engineers
  • Lead design reviews and architectural discussions
  • Help engineers navigate complex technical challenges
  • Contribute directly to the codebase across infrastructure, backend services, APIs, and product development
  • Review code and provide feedback on implementation approaches
  • Identify opportunities to improve reliability, scalability, performance, and developer productivity
  • Support technical decision-making across new products and platform capabilities
  • Work closely with customers and internal stakeholders to understand requirements and translate them into practical solutions
  • Help establish engineering standards as the team continues to grow

Week in the Life

  • Collaborate with the CTO on technical priorities and architectural decisions
  • Review designs and provide guidance on implementation approaches
  • Build and operate services across infrastructure, ML systems, APIs, and customer-facing applications
  • Participate in code reviews and technical discussions
  • Help unblock engineers working through difficult technical problems
  • Work directly with customers to understand requirements and gather feedback
  • Balance hands-on engineering work with technical leadership responsibilities

Ideal Qualifications

  • 7+ years of software engineering experience
  • Experience serving as a senior technical contributor, staff engineer, principal engineer, or technical lead
  • Strong software architecture and distributed systems experience
  • Experience building and operating production infrastructure and cloud services
  • AWS experience (EC2, S3, DynamoDB, Docker, etc.)
  • Ability to mentor engineers and provide technical guidance across multiple projects
  • Strong communication skills and sound engineering judgment
  • Comfort operating in an early-stage startup environment
  • Willingness to work onsite in San Francisco

Technology

  • Our technology sits at the intersection of DevOps, MLOps, and Computational Biology
  • We support workloads ranging from large-scale ML inference and model deployment to workflow orchestration across research, infrastructure, and scientific computing environments
Skills
AWSEC2S3DynamoDBDockerSoftware ArchitectureDistributed SystemsInfrastructureBackend ServicesAPIsMLOpsDevOps
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