Staff Engineer - AI Platforms & Scalable Architecture

Harnham; Oakland (CA); Hybrid; USD 280,000 - 350,000; Full time

Job summary

Harnham is seeking a Staff or Principal Software Engineer to partner with executive technology leadership. The role blends hands-on development with architectural ownership, focusing on AI-powered systems, workflow automation, and scalable platform capabilities.

You will work across distributed teams, design and validate new initiatives, and influence technical direction while delivering production-ready, data-driven software in a lean environment.

Qualifications

• Significant experience as a Staff, Principal, or senior technical leader in a software engineering environment.
• Backend development with Python and Django.
• Frontend development with React or modern web frameworks.
• Experience with AWS cloud services and modern infrastructure practices.
• Expertise with PostgreSQL or similar relational databases.
• Experience building AI-enabled products using modern LLM platforms and APIs.
• Strong system design, architectural decision-making, and software delivery skills.
• Proven ability to move from concept to production while remaining hands-on in implementation.
• Experience working with large-scale data, knowledge-management platforms, search systems, or information-rich applications.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop AI-powered applications, intelligent workflows, and agent-based systems.
• Build solutions leveraging internal datasets and large language model technologies.
• Create scalable backend services and platform capabilities that support product growth.
• Develop commercial and operational intelligence systems using behavioural and engagement data.
• Drive customer-focused experimentation, validation, and iterative product development.
• Build and optimise marketing technology capabilities, including personalisation, communications, engagement, and growth initiatives.
• Define technical architecture, establish engineering best practices, and contribute high-quality production code.
• Partner with product, business, and engineering stakeholders to translate ideas into scalable solutions.
• Collaborate effectively with distributed engineering teams across multiple time zones.

Skills

Leadership

Architectural design

Hands-on coding

Tools

Python

Django

React

AWS

PostgreSQL

LLM APIs

Job description

Harnham is seeking a Staff or Principal Software Engineer to partner with executive technology leadership. The role blends hands-on development with architectural ownership, focusing on AI-powered systems, workflow automation, and scalable platform capabilities.

You will work across distributed teams, design and validate new initiatives, and influence technical direction while delivering production-ready, data-driven software in a lean environment.