Staff Software Engineer

David Joseph & Company; New York (NY); On-site; USD 200,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical benefits

Dental benefits

Vision benefits

401(k) with employer match

Office meals

Job summary

David Joseph & Company in New York City is hiring for a deeply technical principal IC role. You will own the platform layer used by multiple engineering pods, partnering with engineers, accountants, and customers to build abstractions that make hard problems simple.

Expect high ownership and hands-on coding across the stack. In this on-site role, you will work with Python as the primary language, with TypeScript on frontend when needed.

Qualifications

• 6+ years backend and platform engineering experience.
• Distributed systems, data infrastructure, or AI/agent platform depth.
• Startup experience in early-stage companies.

Responsibilities

• Own the agent harness and abstractions for context, verification, guardrails, observability, and tooling to ship audit-grade AI agents.
• Design and implement the financial context graph with ledger state, dimensions, policies, and contracts.
• Define verification, auditability, evals, and observability standards and enforce them by construction.
• Architect the financial data platform for ingestion, normalization, reconciliation, and canonical ledger model.
• Design durable execution for long-running AI workflows and exact-once write-back to ERPs.

Skills

Distributed systems

Platform ownership

Backend engineering

Tools

Python

TypeScript

Go

Java

Rust

Job description

New York City, NY · On-site · Full-time
Compensation: $200,000-250,000 + 0.1%-0.35% equity

About the Company

A seed-stage, venture-backed startup building an AI operating system for the finance and CFO function - deploying audit-ready AI agents that connect to a company's existing finance stack (ERPs, banks, billing, payroll, CRM, contracts, email) to automate the work behind close, revenue recognition, reporting, cash management, and audit readiness. The company is backed by leading investors and finance operators, with the goal of letting finance teams review exceptions while AI handles the rest.

Founded 2023 - 1-10 people - Industry: AI Tools

The Role

Own the platform layer that every engineering pod depends on. This is a high-ownership, deeply technical IC role: identify the bottlenecks limiting the company, work directly with engineers, accountants, and customers, and build the abstractions that make hard problems simple. Staff here means depth of impact, not span of control - everyone keeps writing code.

What you'll be doing

• Own the agent harness the entire company builds on - abstractions for context, verification, guardrails, observability, and developer tooling so every pod can ship audit-grade AI agents on shared rails.
• Design and build the financial context graph (ledger state, dimensions, policies, contracts, precedent, entitlements), keeping it coherent, scalable, and multi-tenant safe.
• Define the verification, auditability, evals, and observability standards that determine whether AI output is safe for a customer's books - and enforce them by construction.
• Architect the financial data platform: ingestion, normalization, reconciliation, and the canonical ledger model that turns data from ERPs, banks, billing, payroll, CRMs, and email into a trustworthy source of truth.
• Design the durable execution layer for long-running AI workflows and the exactly-once, audit-ready write-back path to ERPs and systems of record.
• Build abstractions and architectural patterns that make every pod faster, raising engineering standards across the company.

Tech stack: Python (primary); TypeScript on the frontend when needed. Willingness to ramp fast from Go/Java/Rust accepted.

Requirements

• 6+ years backend and platform engineering experience
• Distributed systems, data infrastructure, or AI/agent platform depth
• Platform-layer ownership: built abstractions multiple teams depended on
• Early-stage startup experience (pre-seed to Series B)
• NYC in-person, 6 days per week
• Fintech, ERP, or financial-systems background
• Startup hours, 6 days a week, 9am to 7pm or 8pm

Green Flags

• Staff or Principal IC at a high-growth startup
• Fintech, ERP, ledger, or compliance system background
• Designed and operated AI agent platforms in production
• Operates AI coding agents fluently
• Built under correctness-critical or regulatory constraints

Red Flags

• Frontend-heavy background with no real backend depth
• Only big-company engineering with no startup exposure
• Generic resumes and shallow project descriptions
• Repeated short tenures without clear context

Why Join

• Foundational platform seat: own the layer every engineering pod builds on.
• Deeply technical, high-ownership IC role at an early, well-backed startup.
• Full medical, dental, and vision (employees and dependents); 401(k) with employer match; meals and a stocked NYC office.

Details

• Location — New York City, NY
• Work policy — On-site, 6 days per week; startup hours (9am-7/8pm), in-person NYC
• Compensation — $200,000-250,000 + equity
• Visa sponsorship — None available
• Employment type — Full-time