Staff Software Engineer

Neara; New York, Northern (NY, KY); Hybrid; USD 270,000 - 311,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

Unlimited PTO

Job summary

Onshore in New York City is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to define and drive the technical direction for one of our three pillars—agent infrastructure, tax computation, and data pipelines. You will own end-to-end solutions, shaping durable workflows and evaluation infrastructure while ensuring system correctness.

You’ll influence architectural decisions, mentor engineers, and prototype to turn ideas into robust software.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with staff-level impact across multiple teams or systems.
• Proven track record designing and shipping highly available and correct systems.
• Deep architectural judgment with hands-on coding and prototyping.
• Ability to influence technical direction and align teams without direct authority; strong communication.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the technical strategy for one of Onshore's pillars (agent infrastructure, tax computation, data pipelines).
• Own end-to-end technical solutions for durable workflows, versioned computation, evaluation infrastructure, and filing pipelines.
• Identify and lead infrastructure investments enabling new study types and broader state/entity coverage.
• Make build-versus-buy decisions and craft roadmaps balancing delivery and platform health.
• Advise founders and leadership on technical trade-offs and business implications.
• Multiply the team's impact through primitives, designs, and code reviews.

Skills

Software architecture

Technical leadership

Distributed systems

Influence without authority

In-person NYC presence

Job description

Staff Software Engineer

About Onshore

About Onshore is the modern standard for U.S. companies claiming the R&D tax credit. We find, document, and defend the tax credits and deductions that farms, manufacturers, architects, and engineers have earned. Claiming the R&D tax credit has historically been an ordeal full of consultants, spreadsheets, and hidden fees. Now, our software and AI-powered solutions read every line of a client's records against the tax code, produce verified computations, and are reviewed by a credentialed tax professional before filing.

About the team

Engineering at Onshore is three teams, and Staff engineers own their technical direction. Platform & Agents builds the infrastructure everyone else runs on: the agent execution framework behind every study, the evaluation harness that proves agent output is correct before an expert sees it, and the tooling operators use to run engagements. Agriculture turns farm records into defensible R&D credit computations and is expanding into livestock, dairy, and soil fertility deductions. Corporate Tax & Compliance is taking Onshore from credit studies to the filing itself, with full corporate returns targeting general availability in early 2027.

Staff is the top of our ladder and it is an engineering role in the fullest sense. We run a technical leadership model: no direct reports by default, and your influence comes through architecture, code, and technical direction rather than headcount. You will never be asked to trade your editor for a calendar. The first Staff engineers here set the direction the next ten engineers inherit.

What you'll do

• Define and drive the technical strategy for one of Onshore's three pillars, including multi-year architecture decisions across agent infrastructure, tax computation, and data pipelines

• Own end-to-end technical solutions for the systems that can't be wrong: durable agent workflows, versioned tax computation, evaluation infrastructure, filing pipelines

• Identify and lead the infrastructure investments that unlock what's next: new study types, new entity and state coverage, and higher leverage for the operators who run engagements

• Make principled build-versus-buy decisions and produce technical roadmaps that balance near-term delivery against long-term platform health

• Advise the founders and engineering leadership on technical trade-offs and their downstream implications for the business

• Multiply the team: your primitives, designs, and reviews raise what every other engineer ships

About you

Minimum requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with demonstrated impact at staff or equivalent scope: leading initiatives across multiple teams or systems.

• A proven track record designing and shipping systems that are both highly available and correct, in domains where wrong output has consequences.

• Deep architectural judgment paired with genuinely fast hands. You prototype to think, and your strategy shows up as code.

• The ability to influence technical direction and align teams without direct authority, with excellent written and verbal communication across engineering and leadership.

• High ownership: comfortable with ambiguity, able to define the problem and the plan rather than execute a predefined spec.

• Able to work in person at our New York City office.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience making LLM-powered systems production-reliable: agents, evaluation infrastructure, structured extraction at scale. You know the distance between a demo and a system users rely on.

• Experience owning platforms other teams built on, and the judgment about primitives versus one-offs that comes with it.

• Compliance-aware system design: audit trails, data lineage, financial controls, or regulated-domain experience.

• Experience with correctness-critical computation: ledgers, billing, rules engines, or anything compiler-shaped.

• A track record of raising senior engineers through technical direction and of contributing meaningfully to hiring and engineering culture.

Pay and benefits

The annual base salary for this role is $270,000, with a total equity grant valued at $100,000. Equity is ISOs valued at our Series B preferred price, on a standard four-year vest with a one-year cliff and early exercise available. Benefits include health, dental, and vision coverage and unlimited PTO.

Our interview process

Three conversations, about two hours of live time, with a decision typically one day after each step.

1. Resume deep dive, 30 minutes. We go through your experience and projects at real depth: what you built, the decisions you made, and what you'd do differently. Bring the work you're proud of.

2. Take-home assessment, then a one-hour review. You build something on your own time, then walk us through it live: your assumptions, patterns, and tradeoffs. We care as much about how you reason through the decisions as the code itself.

3. Behavioral interview, 30 minutes. How you work, how you handle ambiguity and disagreement, and whether Onshore is the right place for you, in both directions.

No six-round gauntlets, no trick questions, no waiting weeks to hear back.