Member of Technical Staff

FDE Team; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

FDE Team is hiring a highly accomplished Member of Technical Staff (MTS) to design, build, and scale sophisticated software and AI systems in a hands-on capacity. You will own backend services, distributed systems, data pipelines, and platform capabilities, delivering production-grade AI applications.

You’ll work on ambiguous problems, making architectural decisions and driving end-to-end development with a strong emphasis on reliability, security, and observability.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience with ownership of production systems.
• Strong hands-on programming experience with Python, Go, Java, C++, TypeScript, or similar languages.
• Deep understanding of backend engineering, distributed systems, APIs, databases, and system design.
• Experience architecting and operating scalable, resilient production systems.
• Hands-on experience with AI/ML, LLMs, Generative AI, RAG, agentic systems, or production AI applications.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate scalable production software and AI systems.
• Own complex engineering initiatives from 0→1 through production and scale.
• Architect backend services, APIs, distributed systems, data pipelines, and platform capabilities.
• Build production applications using Python and other modern programming languages.
• Develop and integrate LLM, RAG, agentic AI, retrieval, and intelligent workflow capabilities.
• Design systems for reliability, scalability, security, observability, and fault tolerance.
• Work with structured and unstructured data across modern databases, retrieval systems, and cloud infrastructure.
• Build evaluation, monitoring, testing, and quality frameworks for production AI systems.
• Investigate difficult performance, reliability, data, and infrastructure problems.
• Make architectural decisions while balancing speed, technical quality, and long-term maintainability.
• Rapidly prototype new capabilities and turn successful experiments into reliable production systems.
• Work closely with other senior engineers, product stakeholders, and customer engineering teams.
• Mentor engineers and help establish strong engineering standards without moving away from hands-on development.

Skills

Python

Go

Java

C++

TypeScript

Distributed systems

Education

CS/Engineering/Math degree

Tools

Kubernetes

CI/CD

AWS

Azure

GCP

LLM tooling

Job description

San Francisco, United States | Posted on 09/16/2026

Member of Technical Staff – AI & Core Engineering

About the Opportunity

FDE Team builds and deploys Forward Deployed Engineering teams that embed directly into customer organizations, working inside their systems, technology stacks, and workflows from day one. Our engineering pods work across Core Engineering, AI, Sales Ops, Marketing Growth, and Cloud Cost Optimization, helping companies modernize technology, automate operations, and deploy production-ready systems in weeks.

This is an opportunity for engineers who enjoy building from 0→1, solving ambiguous and technically complex problems, and shipping production-ready systems in a fast-moving environment.

Backed by SA Technologies, a global technology leader with enterprise delivery expertise across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.

Member of Technical Staff – AI & Core Engineering

Job Title: Member of Technical Staff (MTS) – AI & Core Engineering

Department: AI / Core Engineering

Employment Type: Full-Time

Work Model: Onsite

Travel: Limited customer travel may be required

About the Role

FDE Team is hiring a highly accomplished Member of Technical Staff (MTS) to design, build, and scale sophisticated software and AI systems.

This is a deeply hands-on engineering role for someone with strong foundations in backend engineering, distributed systems, data infrastructure, and production AI. You will work on technically challenging problems where reliability, scalability, security, and engineering quality matter.

You will take ownership across the complete engineering lifecycle—from understanding an ambiguous problem and defining architecture to prototyping, implementation, deployment, observability, and continuous improvement.

We are looking for an engineer who can operate with significant autonomy, make strong technical decisions, and remain deeply involved in writing and reviewing production code.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and operate scalable production software and AI systems.
  
• Own complex engineering initiatives from 0→1 through production and scale.
  
• Architect backend services, APIs, distributed systems, data pipelines, and platform capabilities.
  
• Build production applications using Python and other modern programming languages.
  
• Develop and integrate LLM, RAG, agentic AI, retrieval, and intelligent workflow capabilities.
  
• Design systems for reliability, scalability, security, observability, and fault tolerance.
  
• Work with structured and unstructured data across modern databases, retrieval systems, and cloud infrastructure.
  
• Build evaluation, monitoring, testing, and quality frameworks for production AI systems.
  
• Investigate difficult performance, reliability, data, and infrastructure problems.
  
• Make architectural decisions while balancing speed, technical quality, and long-term maintainability.
  
• Rapidly prototype new capabilities and turn successful experiments into reliable production systems.
  
• Work closely with other senior engineers, product stakeholders, and customer engineering teams when required.
  
• Mentor engineers and help establish strong engineering standards without moving away from hands-on development.
  

What We're Looking For

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant ownership of production systems.
  
• Strong hands-on programming experience with Python, Go, Java, C++, TypeScript, or similar languages.
  
• Deep understanding of backend engineering, distributed systems, APIs, databases, and system design.
  
• Experience architecting and operating scalable, resilient production systems.
  
• Hands-on experience with AI/ML, LLMs, Generative AI, RAG, agentic systems, or production AI applications.
  
• Strong experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
  
• Experience with modern infrastructure including containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, observability, and production monitoring.
  
• Strong understanding of data structures, algorithms, concurrency, performance, and software architecture.
  
• Ability to independently navigate ambiguous technical problems and make sound engineering decisions.
  
• Experience taking products or major technical capabilities from prototype to production.
  
• Excellent debugging, analytical, and systems-thinking abilities.
  
• Bachelor's or advanced degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, AI/ML, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Previous experience as a Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, Member of Technical Staff, Founding Engineer, or early-stage engineer.
  
• Experience building products or platforms in a startup / 0→1 environment.
  
• Experience with high-scale distributed systems, event-driven architectures, real-time data processing, or infrastructure platforms.
  
• Production experience with LLM orchestration, RAG, AI agents, model evaluation, embeddings, vector search, knowledge graphs, or multimodal AI.
  
• Experience building secure systems handling sensitive or regulated data.
  
• Experience at a high-growth technology, AI, or product engineering organization.
  
• Demonstrated technical leadership while remaining a strong individual contributor.
  

What Makes This Role Different

This is not a management or architecture-only position. The MTS is expected to remain deeply hands-on, personally designing, building, debugging, and shipping critical systems.

You'll work on problems where the solution may not already be defined—requiring a combination of first-principles engineering, rapid experimentation, strong technical judgment, and production ownership.

The role is well suited to engineers who have previously operated as senior individual contributors, founding engineers, or technical leaders and want significant ownership in a fast-moving engineering environment.

About FDE Team

FDE Team builds and deploys high-performing Forward Deployed Engineering teams that work directly within customer environments—across their systems, technology stacks, codebases, and workflows—to solve complex engineering challenges and deliver production-ready solutions.

Our engineers work across AI, core engineering, enterprise integrations, cloud, data, automation, and digital transformation, supporting both innovative technology companies and large enterprise organizations.

At FDE Team, engineers don't simply advise—they design, build, integrate, deploy, and own outcomes.

FDE Team is backed by SA Technologies, bringing global technology delivery expertise and established enterprise experience across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.