Staff Software Engineer | Developer & Agent Productivity

A well-funded AI company is hiring a Staff Engineer to own the developer-productivity infrastructure that makes both engineers and AI coding agents fast and effective.

This is a platform role with real scope - dev environments, CI, build and test workflows, verification systems, and safe agent tool access - and it sits between two of the most important trends in software engineering right now: AI-assisted development and high-stakes, security-conscious infrastructure.

If you're a daily user of AI coding agents with strong opinions on where they work and where they don't, this is the role.

Company Culture

• Engineering culture that treats developer productivity as a first-class product, not an afterthought
• Hybrid in San Francisco, 3 days per week in office
• Thoughtful about security and compliance without letting it freeze progress

What's on Offer

• Competitive Staff-level compensation package
• Equity at a meaningful stage of growth
• Hybrid working - SF office 3x per week
• The opportunity to define how AI-assisted engineering works at a company where it genuinely matters

What You'll Be Doing

• Owning the local dev experience - devboxes, local DBs, Docker workflows, dependencies, secrets, and agent ergonomics
• Making build and CI feedback loops faster and more reliable; reducing flaky tests and improving CI failure modes
• Building verification infrastructure for high-risk workflows - migrations, schema changes, API contracts, and structured evidence that lets reviewers trust agent-generated code
• Replacing bespoke scripts and tribal knowledge with paved-road CLIs, scaffolds, templates, and release utilities
• Creating scoped, auditable agent tool access to local DBs, browsers, CI, logs, and docs while keeping PHI and production-data workflows controlled
• Setting repo standards and context structures that make AI coding agents genuinely useful, not just functional

What We're Looking For

Platform and Developer Productivity (Core Requirement)

• 7+ years of software engineering experience with demonstrable Staff-level impact across teams
• Deep hands-on experience building developer productivity, platform, CI, test, or internal tooling systems that engineers actually adopted
• Strong backend and platform fundamentals in TypeScript, Go, Rust, Python, or similar

AI Agent Practitioner

• Daily user of AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or equivalent) on real production codebases
• Clear, well-formed opinions on where agents help, where they fail, and what infrastructure makes them reliable

Security Judgment

• Able to translate risk into practical controls - scoped access, audit trails, PHI-safe workflows - without freezing engineering progress

If this sounds like your kind of role, feel free to reach out for a confidential chat.