Founding Staff Engineer – AI/LLM Platforms (Hybrid)

Talent Stack; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity 1%-1.5%

Hybrid work arrangement

Job summary

Talent Stack is seeking a Founding Staff Software Engineer to anchor a small, high‑impact engineering team building AI/LLM products for healthcare tech. You will own features end‑to‑end, ship production code daily, and mentor junior engineers while collaborating closely with the CTO, founders, product, and customer success teams.

The role requires 8+ years of experience, hands‑on leadership, and a track record of shipping LLM‑powered capabilities.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, ideally 8–15 years
• Experience as staff/founding engineer or technical anchor for a team
• Strong full‑stack product‑engineering ability across frontend, backend, infra, and deployment
• Recent hands-on experience shipping LLM‑powered features or AI agents
• Experience launching zero‑to‑one, customer‑facing products
• Excellent communication and ability to partner with product leaders, customers, and founders
• Ability to work onsite in San Francisco every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday

Responsibilities

• Own AI-powered products from discovery through architecture, development, deployment, and iteration
• Build production‑grade LLM features, AI agents, and multi‑step workflows
• Architect and deliver full‑stack applications across frontend, backend, infra, and data layers
• Serve as technical lead for major projects and coordinate engineers
• Write, review, test, and ship production code daily
• Mentor three junior engineers through coaching and code reviews
• Establish code quality, testing, documentation, CI/CD, and engineering processes
• Design production evaluations, observability, and monitoring for LLM systems
• Partner with product, customer success, founders, and customers to identify problems and shape products
• Make pragmatic architectural decisions balancing speed, quality, scalability
• Help define engineering culture, roadmaps, and long‑term standards

Skills

Founding team leadership

LLM/AI features

Full-stack development

Mentoring

Technical leadership

Stakeholder collaboration

Onsite presence

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or STEM

Tools

Python

TypeScript

React

SQL

LLMs & agentic frameworks

LangSmith

Braintrust

Weights & Biases

CI/CD

Cloud infrastructure

Job description

Talent Stack is seeking a Founding Staff Software Engineer to anchor a small, high‑impact engineering team building AI/LLM products for healthcare tech. You will own features end‑to‑end, ship production code daily, and mentor junior engineers while collaborating closely with the CTO, founders, product, and customer success teams.

The role requires 8+ years of experience, hands‑on leadership, and a track record of shipping LLM‑powered capabilities.