Chief Engineer

Rise Talent Advisors; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 230,000 - 350,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Job summary

Rise Talent Advisors is partnering with a San Francisco AI software company to hire a Chief Engineer on site in San Francisco five days a week. The role leads a pod and owns a domain end to end, writing code and setting technical standards for high-impact AI systems.

You will work closely with product management, shape the technical direction, and drive delivery across core AI runtime, data systems and conversational agents. Equity is included in the offer.

Qualifications

• 6 to 14 years of experience with a Staff or Principal software engineer title.
• Startup experience through Series A–C, under 500 people.
• End-to-end ownership of a critical system or product.
• Hands-on production experience building large language model agents live with real users.
• Current hands-on coding with recent examples of code you wrote and debugged.
• Strong engineering fundamentals in Node.js, React and Python.
• Daily, deep use of frontier AI tools in workflow.
• On-site in San Francisco five days a week.

Responsibilities

• Own a technical domain end to end and run a pod directly, staying deeply hands on.
• Design the systems for your domain and write the code; set the technical bar by doing the work.
• Ship, review and hold the line on quality and speed across your domain.
• Steer and unblock the engineers and leads in your domain, and grow their technical ability while staying hands on.
• Partner as an equal with your domain's product manager on what the domain delivers and its impact.
• Take part in a regular technical council with the founders and help shape the product's direction.
• Build on frontier models and make AI development tools standard practice for everyone in your domain.
• Domains could include core AI runtime, retrieval/evaluation/data systems, conversational agents, integrations with customer systems, analytics on outcomes, and the shared data platform.

Skills

Node.js

React

Python

Conversational AI

Education

Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field

MS or PhD (preferred)

Job description

This role is on site in San Francisco, five days a week.

We are helping a venture backed, profitable AI software company in San Francisco hire Chief Engineers. The company builds agentic AI products for regulated financial services organizations across the US, including the AI agents their end customers talk to, tools that make employees more capable, and the data and integration systems underneath. It has real revenue and a large base of enterprise customers.

Chief Engineer is the company's most senior technical track. The engineering team is small and organized into pods, and each pod is led by a Chief Engineer. You own a domain end to end and lead through technical credibility rather than headcount. Because the team leans on AI for routine work, everyone on it is senior.

What you will do

• Own a technical domain end to end and run a pod directly, staying deeply hands on.
• Design the systems for your domain and write the code. Set the technical bar by doing the work.
• Ship, review and hold the line on quality and speed across your domain.
• Steer and unblock the engineers and leads in your domain, and grow their technical ability, without becoming a pure manager.
• Partner as an equal with your domain's product manager on what the domain delivers and the impact it has.
• Take part in a regular technical council with the founders and help shape the product's direction.
• Build on frontier models and make AI development tools standard practice for everyone in your domain.
• Domains could include the core AI runtime and its retrieval, evaluation and data systems, conversational agents, integrations that let agents take real actions in customer systems, analytics on outcomes, the shared data platform, and the platform customers use to build their own agents.

What you need

• 6 to 14 years of experience, with an actual Staff or Principal software engineer title.
• Time at a startup through a scaling stage (Series A through Series C, under 500 people), where you built something of lasting value as it grew.
• A critical system or product you owned end to end from zero to one.
• Hands on production experience building large language model agents that are live with real users at scale, ideally conversational AI. Internal tools, proofs of concept, pre launch platforms and side projects do not count.
• Current hands on coding. You can discuss code you personally wrote and debugged recently, including specific design tradeoffs.
• Strong engineering fundamentals, ideally with Node.js, React and Python.
• Daily, deep use of frontier AI tools in your workflow, and concrete examples of how you use them.
• You can work on site in San Francisco five days a week.

Nice to have

• Experience as a hands on technical founder who scaled a product.
• A degree in computer science or a related field. An MS or PhD is a plus.
• Exposure to financial services.

What this search is not

• This search is not for people who prefer a management track or are no longer hands on with code.
• This search is not for backgrounds only at large companies with more than 500 employees.
• This search is not for machine learning modeling only or mobile only profiles.

Location

• On site in the San Francisco Financial District, San Francisco, California, five days a week.
• Visa transfers can be considered. New visa sponsorship is not available.
• Full time, direct hire role. Equity is part of the offer.

Rise Talent Advisors is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome people of all backgrounds.