Staff/Principal Software Engineer

Location

San Francisco, CA

Hybrid role requiring 3 days/week in the San Francisco office.

Compensation

$217,000 – $410,000 Base + 15% Target Bonus + Competitive Equity

Staff: $217,000 – $274,000
Principal: $274,000 – $410,000

Candidates at the top of the compensation bands are expected to demonstrate top-10% engineering performance at their level.

Visa

No visa sponsorship or transfers

Company Stage

Profitable, High-Growth AI / SaaS Company

Industry

Artificial Intelligence, B2B SaaS, Go-to-Market Technology, Sales Technology, Revenue Intelligence, AI Agents, Enterprise Software

About the Company

Our client is building an AI-powered end-to-end go-to-market platform that helps sales, marketing, and revenue teams find prospects, engage customers, and close deals with greater intelligence and efficiency.

The platform combines a massive B2B contact and company database with an AI-native suite of prospecting, engagement, sequencing, and revenue intelligence tools.

More than 500,000 companies rely on the platform, with hundreds of thousands of users depending on its systems every day.

The company is profitable and growing rapidly while undertaking a major AI-native rebuild of its product around AI agents and intelligent workflows.

As a Staff or Principal Software Engineer, you'll operate as a high-leverage individual contributor responsible for technical direction, architecture, and some of the hardest engineering problems across the organization.

This is an opportunity for a senior technical leader who has built and operated large-scale distributed systems and can move between high-priority projects while influencing engineering teams, product leadership, and executive stakeholders.

What You'll Do

• Own the architecture and technical direction for significant areas of the platform
• Lead the design and development of large-scale distributed systems
• Work on agent-centric AI products and AI-native product architecture
• Solve the most technically complex engineering problems across the organization
• Make critical build-versus-buy, architecture, infrastructure, and cost tradeoffs
• Design systems capable of serving hundreds of thousands of users at scale
• Drive technical strategy across multiple engineering teams
• Establish engineering standards, patterns, and best practices
• Raise the technical bar across the engineering organization
• Multiply the output and effectiveness of engineers around you
• Partner closely with engineering leadership on technical direction
• Collaborate with product leadership to align technical architecture with business goals
• Work closely with VPs and C-suite engineering leaders on high-priority initiatives
• Own systems end-to-end from design through production deployment and operation
• Diagnose and solve complex scalability, reliability, and performance challenges
• Contribute directly to architecture and implementation of critical systems
• Move between high-priority technical projects based on organizational needs
• Evaluate emerging technologies and determine where they can provide meaningful leverage
• Use AI-assisted development as a first-class part of the engineering workflow
• Leverage AI agents to accelerate design, investigation, debugging, and implementation
• Help drive the company's broader transition toward AI-native engineering workflows
• Build highly reliable and scalable backend systems
• Contribute to distributed systems, search, data, infrastructure, or AI/agent-centric initiatives
• Work across teams to solve cross-cutting engineering challenges
• Operate with extreme ownership over correctness, performance, reliability, and technical outcomes
• Make independent technical decisions in a fast-moving engineering organization
• Mentor and influence engineers through technical leadership rather than formal management
• Help shape the long-term architecture and engineering direction of the company

Ideal Candidate Background

Experience Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in backend or full-stack software engineering
• Experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems
• Experience designing systems that serve hundreds of thousands or millions of users
• Strong experience owning production systems end-to-end
• Experience working on complex, high-scale software platforms
• Experience solving difficult architecture, scalability, reliability, or performance problems
• Experience operating as a senior technical individual contributor
• Experience influencing engineering direction across multiple teams
• Experience partnering with senior engineering and product leadership
• Experience working in high-bar engineering organizations
• Strong track record of technical ownership and execution
• Experience making architecture and infrastructure tradeoffs independently
• Experience working on technically complex products with significant scale
• Strong ability to operate across multiple high-priority engineering initiatives
• Experience mentoring and raising the technical capabilities of other engineers
• Strong product and business awareness
• Ability to operate autonomously with limited direction
• Experience working in fast-moving, high-growth technology companies

Technical Requirements

• Strong backend software engineering fundamentals
• Strong experience designing distributed systems
• Experience with large-scale production systems
• Strong system design and architecture capabilities
• Experience with scalability, reliability, and performance engineering
• Experience with production infrastructure and cloud environments
• Strong understanding of databases and data-intensive systems
• Experience with APIs and backend services
• Experience with search or large-scale data systems preferred
• Experience with AI/ML or agent-centric systems preferred
• Experience building AI-powered products preferred
• Experience with AI-assisted development workflows
• Ability to evaluate technical architecture and infrastructure tradeoffs
• Strong understanding of system reliability and operational excellence
• Experience with containerization and orchestration technologies
• Experience with Kubernetes and Docker preferred
• Experience with cloud platforms such as GCP preferred
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code such as Terraform preferred
• Experience with Elasticsearch or comparable search technologies preferred
• Experience with MongoDB or other distributed databases preferred
• Strong coding and debugging skills
• Ability to work across unfamiliar systems and codebases
• Ability to quickly understand complex technical architectures
• Ability to make pragmatic build-versus-buy decisions
• Ability to balance engineering quality, speed, cost, and scalability
• Strong understanding of software development lifecycle and production operations
• Ability to use modern AI coding tools and agents effectively

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field preferred
• Strong technical education preferred
• Equivalent practical software engineering experience accepted

Soft Skills

• Exceptional technical ownership
• Strong architectural and engineering judgment
• High intellectual curiosity
• Ability to solve highly ambiguous technical problems
• Strong written and verbal communication
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills
• Comfortable working with VPs and C-suite engineering leaders
• Strong ability to influence without formal authority
• High technical standards
• Product-minded engineering approach
• Strong business judgment
• Ability to make difficult technical tradeoffs
• Comfortable operating with significant autonomy
• Strong mentoring and technical leadership ability
• Low-ego collaboration style
• Strong bias toward action and execution
• Comfortable moving between different technical problems and projects
• Strong accountability for production outcomes
• Passion for building systems at significant scale
• Comfortable in high-bar engineering environments
• Excited about AI-native development and agentic engineering workflows
• Strong continuous-learning mindset
• Comfortable experimenting with new technologies
• Strong ability to operate in fast-moving environments
• Comfortable working onsite in San Francisco 3 days/week

Compensation & Benefits

• Staff Base Salary: $217,000 – $274,000
• Principal Base Salary: $274,000 – $410,000
• 15% target bonus
• Competitive equity package
• AI tooling budget for engineering development
• Opportunity to work on large-scale systems serving hundreds of thousands of users
• High technical ownership and autonomy
• Opportunity to influence architecture across a large engineering organization
• Direct exposure to VPs and C-suite engineering leadership
• Opportunity to work on an AI-native rebuild of a major B2B platform
• Exposure to agentic AI and modern AI-assisted development workflows
• Strong engineering culture with high technical standards
• Growth and career development support
• Hybrid work flexibility in San Francisco
• Opportunity to solve some of the company's hardest technical problems

Why Join

This is an opportunity to join a high-bar engineering organization undergoing a major transformation toward AI-native software and agentic products.

You'll operate as a high-leverage technical individual contributor, owning architecture and solving some of the most difficult engineering problems across a platform used by more than 500,000 companies.

You'll work directly with senior engineering leadership and have the opportunity to influence systems, standards, architecture, and technical strategy across multiple teams.

The role is ideal for an engineer who enjoys solving complex distributed-systems problems, operating at significant scale, influencing technical direction, and staying deeply hands-on with engineering.

If you want Staff or Principal-level scope without moving into engineering management, this role offers exceptional technical ownership, visibility, and impact.