Chief / Staff Software Engineer

W3 Sourcing; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Meaningful equity

Competitive compensation

Full benefits

Job summary

W3 Sourcing is seeking exceptional Staff/Principal engineers to take end-to-end ownership of major technical domains in a fast-growing AI platform. You will be a deeply hands-on technical leader who architectures systems, writes production code, and sets the technical bar by doing the work yourself.

You will own a product domain, collaborate with founders and product leadership, and help shape the next generation of AI-native financial services, with equity and meaningful impact.

Qualifications

• 6-14 years of software engineering experience, with 8-12 years common.
• Significant technical ownership of mission-critical systems.
• Experience with building and operating at real scale in high-growth environments.
• Strong fundamentals in software engineering and systems design.
• Ability to reason from first principles and learn quickly in unfamiliar domains.
• Experience with agentic AI, conversational AI, LLMs, or fintech is highly relevant.

Responsibilities

• Own a major technical domain end-to-end and set architecture direction.
• Architect systems, write production code and maintain quality standards.
• Review and unblock other senior engineers through technical credibility.
• Collaborate with founders, product leadership and Domain PM on strategy and outcomes.
• Build scalable, reliable AI-enabled systems that serve real customers.

Job description

Chief/ Staff Software Engineer

Location: San Francisco, CA - 5 days in office preferred

Employment: Full-time

Compensation: Competitive + meaningful equity

Remote: Considered for exceptional US-based candidates

Visa: H1B transfers considered

The Opportunity

We're hiring exceptional Staff / Principal-level engineers to take end-to-end ownership of major technical domains within a fast-growing agentic AI platform.

This is not a traditional engineering management role.

You will be a deeply hands-on technical leader who architects systems, writes production code, reviews critical work and sets the technical bar by doing the work yourself. You'll have the autonomy of a founding engineer while operating on a platform that already serves real customers at meaningful scale.

Think of the role as being the technical owner of an entire product or platform domain - responsible not only for how it is built, but for whether it succeeds.

You’ll work directly with founders and product leadership, partner closely with a Domain PM, and help shape the next generation of AI-native financial services.

What You Could Own

Depending on your technical strengths, you could take ownership of areas including:

• Agent runtime & intelligence - model orchestration, reasoning, retrieval, knowledge systems, evaluation and continuous-improvement loops
• Voice & conversational AI - production AI agents across voice and chat
• AI-first contact centre systems - making human teams dramatically more capable through AI
• Agent actions & computer use - integrations and systems that allow agents to take real actions across external platforms
• Agent-building infrastructure - platforms and tooling for internal teams and customers to build and deploy agents
• Data platforms & fraud systems - shared data infrastructure, intelligence and cross-customer fraud detection
• AI-native consumer products - experiences that understand users, make decisions and act on their behalf
• Reliability & operations - high-scale systems that keep AI products fast, observable and dependable

We’re looking for exceptional generalists with real depth. You do not need to fit neatly into one of these areas before joining.

What You’ll Do

• Own a critical technical domain end-to-end
• Architect systems and make the most important technical trade-offs
• Continue to write and ship production code
• Take ambiguous problems from first principles through to production
• Set engineering standards for quality, reliability and velocity
• Review and unblock other senior engineers through technical credibility
• Partner with product leadership on both technical direction and business outcomes
• Build systems designed for real-world scale, reliability and customer usage
• Help establish an AI-native engineering culture
• Use frontier AI development tools such as Claude Code, Cursor and similar platforms as a core part of your engineering workflow
• Rapidly learn unfamiliar technologies and domains when the problem requires it

What We’re Looking For

You are likely to have 6-14 years of software engineering experience, with approximately 8-12 years being a common sweet spot.

More importantly, your track record shows that you have already operated with significant technical ownership.

Strong candidates may currently be:

• Staff Software Engineers
• Principal Engineers
• Senior Staff Engineers
• Technical Leads who remain highly hands-on
• Exceptional Senior Engineers ready to step into Staff-level ownership
• Hands-on technical founders or CTOs who never stopped building

You should have several of the following:

• Evidence of owning a mission-critical system, platform or product end-to-end
• Strong 01 experience - you have taken something from an idea or ambiguous problem into production
• Experience building systems that reached real users and operated at meaningful scale
• Strong software engineering and systems-design fundamentals
• The ability to reason from first principles rather than relying on familiar patterns
• High learning velocity - you can enter an unfamiliar problem space and become productive quickly
• Experience in a high-growth startup, scale-up or similarly high-velocity environment
• Comfort working through ambiguity and changing requirements
• Deep, daily use of modern AI development tools
• A strong preference for building and technical ownership over people management

Experience with agentic AI, conversational AI, voice AI, LLM systems, retrieval, evaluation, distributed systems, AI infrastructure or fintech is highly relevant, but we will also consider outstanding engineers from adjacent technical domains.

Technical Environment

Our current environment includes:

• Python
• Node.js
• React
• Frontier foundation models
• Modern AI development tooling

We care more about strong engineering fundamentals, learning speed and evidence that you can take ownership of complex systems than whether you have used a particular framework before.

Own something meaningful

You will not be one of dozens of Staff Engineers responsible for a narrow slice of infrastructure.

You will own a major technical domain outright and have meaningful influence over architecture, product direction and outcomes.

Build AI that already has real-world distribution

This is not a research project or pre-product experiment.

The underlying platform already powers AI experiences for financial institutions and millions of end users. What you build can reach real customers quickly.

Work on the hard part of agentic AI

The challenge is not simply generating better responses.

The systems need to understand intent, authenticate users, reason, retrieve information, interact with external systems and actually complete tasks end-to-end.

That creates unusually rich engineering problems across AI, distributed systems, data, voice, security, reliability and product infrastructure.

Stay technical while increasing your influence

This is a senior technical career path built around technical credibility rather than headcount.

You can have founder-level influence over an important part of the platform while remaining deeply involved in architecture and code.

Competitive compensation + meaningful equity

Full benefits are provided.

If you are a senior engineer who wants more ownership, harder technical problems and greater product impact without moving away from building, we'd like to hear from you.