Staff Product Software Engineer

Luma; Redwood City (CA); On-site; USD 260,000 - 380,000; Full time

Job summary

Luma seeks a senior technical leader to set the direction for building production software with AI agents. You’ll decide what to build, define system boundaries, and own critical outcomes end to end from framing to deployment.

You’ll mentor engineers to use AI tools without sacrificing rigor, shape architecture early, and balance speed, reliability, and complexity across large-scale systems. This role requires world-class judgment and deep product intuition.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building and shipping production software.
• Non-trivial projects with technical direction and execution end to end.
• High-stakes technical decisions that affect a system or product.
• Fluency with AI coding tools, used to ship real functionality in production.

Responsibilities

• Direct AI coding agents to build production systems quickly, holding line on design and behavior.
• Decide what to build and what not to build as implementation costs drop.
• Set technical direction across engineering: system boundaries, data models, ownership, and operations.
• Co-own product direction with design and research.
• Make hard trade-offs between speed, reliability, complexity, and extensibility.
• Shape architecture early and own outcomes end to end from framing to deployment.
• Mentor engineers on using AI tools without lowering rigor.

Skills

System design

Distributed systems

Security

Infrastructure

Leadership

AI tooling fluency

Tools

AI coding tools

Job description

You'll set technical direction for how products get built at Luma, directing AI coding agents to ship production systems fast while making the disciplined calls on scope, structure, and trade-offs. This is a senior role where judgment, not typing, is the constraint.

With AI making implementation cheap, weak decisions compound faster, so the job is deciding what to build, what not to, and where code should exist at all. It's for a technical leader with deep system-design judgment and real product intuition who is genuinely world‑class at directing AI agents. If you measure your impact by lines of code written, this isn't framed for you.

What You'll Own

• Direct AI coding agents to build production systems quickly, holding the line on system design, ownership, and real-world behavior.
• Decide what to build and what not to build as implementation costs drop.
• Set technical direction across engineering: system boundaries, data models, ownership, and operational expectations.
• Co‑own product direction with design and research.
• Make and stand behind hard trade‑offs between speed, reliability, complexity, and extensibility.
• Shape architecture early, and own critical outcomes end to end from framing to deployment.
• Mentor engineers on using AI tools without lowering rigor, and eliminate recurring classes of design mistakes.

First 90 Days

One way the first 90 could unfold.

• Days 1–30 — Immerse & Diagnose: Learn the systems and product, and find where complexity or ambiguity is slowing the team.
• Days 30–60 — Ship & Validate: Own a critical outcome end to end and set technical direction on a meaningful surface.
• Days 60–90 — Scale & Systemize: Establish the standards and workflows that let small teams ship with outsized impact.

What You Bring

• 8+ years building and shipping production software.
• Multiple non‑trivial projects where you owned technical direction and execution end to end.
• High‑stakes technical decisions that materially affected a system or product.
• Fluency with AI coding tools, used to ship real functionality in production or substantial side projects.
• Strong technical depth (system design, distributed systems, security, infrastructure) or strong product intuition (user empathy, prioritization, UX taste), ideally both.

Nice to Have

• Personal responsibility for a measurable real‑world success — a product at 100k+ users or 1M+ monthly actives, a system serving millions of requests a day, or an open‑source project with 10k+ stars or meaningful adoption.

About Luma: Luma's mission is to build unified general intelligence that can generate, understand, and operate in the physical world. We believe multimodality is critical for intelligence — the next step beyond language models comes from vision. Luma is an equal opportunity employer.