Principal Engineer - AI Systems & Production Scale

Success Matcher Recruitment; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 350,000 - 520,000; Full time

Job summary

Success Matcher Recruitment is recruiting for a fast-growing AI startup in San Francisco. The role requires leading architecture and delivering production-grade AI systems in regulated financial environments, with direct collaboration with founders and senior engineers.

The candidate will own a core technical domain, guide engineers, and shape the engineering culture, deploying cutting-edge tools and frameworks in a high-stakes setting.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of engineering experience with leadership roles
• Proven experience owning large-scale production systems
• Deep expertise in AI, LLMs, and agentic systems
• Strong hands-on coding and system architecture skills

Responsibilities

• Own a core technical domain end-to-end, driving architecture and business outcomes
• Architect and build production systems through hands-on technical leadership
• Partner with founders and product leadership on high-impact architectural decisions
• Guide and unblock senior engineers while elevating the technical bar
• Build systems across AI agents, runtimes, conversational/voice AI, data platforms and AI-native product experiences
• Drive an AI-native engineering culture using frontier tools like Claude Code and Cursor

Skills

AI systems

System architecture

Leadership

Production systems

Coding

Regulated environments

Education

BS/MS in CS or STEM

Tools

Claude Code

Cursor

Job description

Success Matcher Recruitment is recruiting for a fast-growing AI startup in San Francisco. The role requires leading architecture and delivering production-grade AI systems in regulated financial environments, with direct collaboration with founders and senior engineers.

The candidate will own a core technical domain, guide engineers, and shape the engineering culture, deploying cutting-edge tools and frameworks in a high-stakes setting.