Senior Software Engineer

SproutsAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

A fast-moving tech startup in San Francisco is seeking a Senior Software Engineer to design and build production services while evolving AI stack features. The ideal candidate thrives in a startup environment, possesses a strong curiosity for technology, and is self-driven. This role offers competitive salary and equity, contributing to innovative projects within a collaborative team.

Qualifications

• Experience with LLMs, embedding pipelines, and hybrid ranking strategies.
• Hands-on coding experience with modern frameworks and languages.
• Understanding of security protocols and data handling.

Responsibilities

• Design & build production services and user interfaces.
• Evolve AI stack prototype to production-level features.
• Collaborate with product and design teams for optimal outcomes.

Skills

Curiosity

Self-driven

Systems mindset

API ergonomics

Data foundations

LLM-practical

Security instincts

Tools

Postgres

Vector DBs

TypeScript

Job description

San Francisco, California, USA - In Office

Actively hiring

Job type :

Full-time

Department :

Engineering and Development

Workplace type :

In Office

Experience :

0 years

Senior Software Engineer (Startup)

About the role

We`re a fast-moving, top tier VC funded Silicon Valley startup, building ambitious products at the intersection of web apps and modern AI systems. That means we`re looking for people who thrive in ambiguity, move quickly, and love building zero-to-one products. We ship fast, cut clean corners, and obsess over reliability, security and craft. You`ll work end-to-end—from whiteboard to prod—owning services, shaping architecture, and raising the bar for engineering excellence.

You`ll fit right in if you`ve worked in an early-stage company before — or if you`ve always wanted to experience the intensity and freedom of a startup. We value initiative over process, learning over perfection, and collaboration over hierarchy.

Things change daily, and that`s part of the fun you`ll wear multiple hats, experiment, and help shape both the product and the culture from the very beginning.

What you`ll do

• Design & build production services and UIs, from APIs to frontends, with an eye for simplicity, performance, and operability.
• Own systems instrument, monitor, and debug in prod; drive incident response and post-mortems; automate everything.
• Evolve our AI stack prototype and productionize features that depend on LLMs—prompt pipelines, evals, guardrails, retrieval, and memory.
• Tune & measure experiment with model selection, finetuning, quantization, LoRA, PEFT, structured outputs, function, tool calling, and latency, cost tradeoffs.
• Ship great APIs design pragmatic REST, GraphQL, and, or gRPC interfaces; versioning, pagination, authN, Z, schema evolution, and backward compatibility.
• Collaborate tightly with product, design to turn ambiguous problems into lovable, secure, and compliant experiences.
• Mentor teammates via reviews, tech talks, and crisp docs.

What makes you a great fit

• Curiosity as a habit you read release notes, try new runtimes and models, and build weekend prototypes for fun, a lot of your Youtube consumption is hacking and learning new technologies, and you enjoy learning what you don`t know on your own
• Self-driven you find the problem behind the problem, align stakeholders, and land outcomes without hand-holding.
• Systems mindset you think in SLOs, budgets (latency, cost, error), blast radius, and graceful degradation.
• API ergonomics you care about naming, error design, rate limits, observability, generated SDKs, and docs that don`t lie.
• Data foundations you know when to pick Postgres vs columnar vs KV vs vector; you`ve shipped schema migrations and zero-downtime deploys.
• LLM-practical you`ve built RAG or agents in anger; you understand context windows, tokenization, evals, and prompt, tooling hygiene.
• Security instincts you default to least privilege, tame secrets, and design auth flows that survive real traffic.

Nice to have

• Hands-on with vector DBs (e.g., FAISS, HNSW, Milvus, PGVector), embeddings pipelines, and hybrid ranking.
• Can Design retrieval layers build embeddings pipelines, vector indexes, hybrid search (BM25 + ANN), chunking, merging strategies, and memory graphs.
• Protocol-fluent you actually enjoy HTTP, 1.1 vs HTTP, 2, 3 quirks, caching semantics, content negotiation, and idempotency.
• Experience with model hosting (self-hosted inference servers, serverless GPUs, or managed endpoints) and caching, streaming strategies.
• Infra chops containers, IaC, CI, CD, service meshes, feature flags, canary, blue-green, cost observability.
• Frontend XP with modern TypeScript frameworks and component systems; accessibility and performance budgets.
• Prior startup experience or meaningful open-source contributions.

How we work

• Bias to action short feedback loops, measured experiments, reversible decisions.
• Quality without ceremony tests, tracing, and dashboards are table stakes.
• Written culture design docs, runbooks, and decision logs that future-you will thank you for.
• Flexible, ownership-heavy take on scope that excites (and scares) you a little.

What success looks like (first 90–180 days)

• You`ve shipped a user-visible feature end-to-end and made it boringly reliable.
• You`ve hardened an API (or three) clear contracts, observability, and error budgets in place.
• You`ve improved our AI retrieval, memory layer with measurable gains in quality or cost.
• You`ve leveled up teammates via patterns, docs, or tooling that sticks.

Compensation & location

Competitive salary + equity; Development team based in San Francisco Bay Area on the mid-peninsula, collaborating with some team members in India and Portugal.

About Us

We are backed by a top-tier Silicon Valley venture capital firm and led by two seasoned Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and executives who have scaled startups from inception to IPO, led successful exits to Fortune 500 companies, and tripled the valuation of publicly traded firms in record time.

If this sounds like you, show us, don`t just tell us share a system you`ve built, the toughest incident you`ve owned, or a small repo that captures your taste, and, or the last two-three things you built and taught yourself.

Find our real company name and send us your accomplishments along with your best guess on the application tech stack we used for the website (and why you think so) to at personai.me.