Staff Software Engineer

Staff Software Engineer Our client is a seed-stage healthcare/life-sciences company building AI agents that automate clinical trial workflows — attacking one of the biggest bottlenecks in drug development. Backed by $7M+ in funding, the platform is already used across 400+ research sites. This is a founding tech-lead role on a small, high-impact engineering team. The role: A hands-on Staff Software Engineer (8+ yrs) to be the technical anchor of a small team — writing and reviewing code daily while mentoring three junior engineers and establishing engineering best practices, and partnering with product, customer success, and founders to ship zero-to-one AI-powered products. Responsibilities - Own and build AI-powered products end-to-end (agentic workflows, LLM features with production evals) - Technical lead and mentor for three junior engineers; set best practices for code review and process - Partner with CTO, PM, and customer success to shape zero-to-one products - Architect and deliver full-stack apps across frontend, backend, infra, and data pipelines Must-have - Tech lead / technical anchor experience on an engineering team - Full-stack product engineer who owns features end-to-end (backend-leaning generalists welcome) - Mentor / bar-raiser able to establish engineering best practices - 8–15 yrs full-stack product engineering, building AI/LLM features - Zero-to-one, customer-facing product background (not deep infra) - Recent (1–2 yrs) hands-on shipping of LLM features / AI agents in production Nice-to-have - Mix of startup (seed–Series B, founding/early hire) and larger-company experience - CS degree or equivalent - Production AI evals / LLM observability (LangSmith, Braintrust, W&B); multi-step agentic pipelines - Genuine interest in bio, life sciences, or healthcare Compensation & logistics - Base salary: $210K–$260K, flexible for exceptional candidates - Equity: 1–1.5% - Full-time, hybrid: 3 days/week in-office (Mon, Tue, Thu), Financial District, San Francisco - Visa: open to transfers (e.g., OPT, H-1B transfers); no new sponsorships - Interview process: 3 steps — 30-min intro call, virtual system design interview, final on-site (technical + behavioral + team lunch)