Staff Software Engineer

Talent Stack; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity 1%-1.5%

Hybrid work arrangement

Job summary

Talent Stack is seeking a Founding Staff Software Engineer to anchor a small, high‑impact engineering team building AI/LLM products for healthcare tech. You will own features end‑to‑end, ship production code daily, and mentor junior engineers while collaborating closely with the CTO, founders, product, and customer success teams.

The role requires 8+ years of experience, hands‑on leadership, and a track record of shipping LLM‑powered capabilities.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, ideally 8–15 years
• Experience as staff/founding engineer or technical anchor for a team
• Strong full‑stack product‑engineering ability across frontend, backend, infra, and deployment
• Recent hands-on experience shipping LLM‑powered features or AI agents
• Experience launching zero‑to‑one, customer‑facing products
• Excellent communication and ability to partner with product leaders, customers, and founders
• Ability to work onsite in San Francisco every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday

Responsibilities

• Own AI-powered products from discovery through architecture, development, deployment, and iteration
• Build production‑grade LLM features, AI agents, and multi‑step workflows
• Architect and deliver full‑stack applications across frontend, backend, infra, and data layers
• Serve as technical lead for major projects and coordinate engineers
• Write, review, test, and ship production code daily
• Mentor three junior engineers through coaching and code reviews
• Establish code quality, testing, documentation, CI/CD, and engineering processes
• Design production evaluations, observability, and monitoring for LLM systems
• Partner with product, customer success, founders, and customers to identify problems and shape products
• Make pragmatic architectural decisions balancing speed, quality, scalability
• Help define engineering culture, roadmaps, and long‑term standards

Skills

Founding team leadership

LLM/AI features

Full-stack development

Mentoring

Technical leadership

Stakeholder collaboration

Onsite presence

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or STEM

Tools

Python

TypeScript

React

SQL

LLMs & agentic frameworks

LangSmith

Braintrust

Weights & Biases

CI/CD

Cloud infrastructure

Job description

Founding Staff Software Engineer - AI/LLM Products

Confidential Venture-Backed Healthcare Technology Startup

Work Arrangement:

Hybrid-onsite Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday

Equity:

1%-1.5%

Employment Type:

Full-time

About the Company:

Our client is a rapidly growing, venture-backed healthcare technology startup building AI-powered products that help clinical trials run faster.

Clinical-trial execution remains one of the largest bottlenecks in bringing new medicines to patients. The company is addressing that problem at the research-site level by helping sites identify the right trials, activate them more efficiently, and manage ongoing trial workflows. Its platform also gives biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies greater visibility into site activity and trial startup.

Although still at the seed stage, the company has secured multi-million-dollar funding and gained adoption across hundreds of clinical-research sites. The team is intentionally small, highly collaborative, and positioned for significant growth.

About the Role:

We are seeking a Founding Staff Software Engineer with at least eight years of experience to serve as the technical anchor of a small, high-impact engineering team.

This is a hands-on individual-contributor role—not a traditional engineering-management position. You will write and review production code daily, lead major technical initiatives, mentor three junior engineers, and establish the engineering practices needed to support the company’s next stage of growth.

Working directly with the CTO, founders, product, and customer-success teams, you will turn customer problems into zero-to-one AI products and own them from early ideation through production.

What You’ll Do:

• Own AI-powered products from customer discovery and initial concept through architecture, development, deployment, and iteration.
• Build production-grade LLM features, AI agents, and multi-step agentic workflows.
• Architect and deliver full-stack applications across the frontend, backend, infrastructure, and data layers.
• Serve as the technical lead for major projects and coordinate the work of other engineers.
• Write, review, test, and ship production code every day.
• Mentor three junior engineers through technical coaching, pairing, and thoughtful code reviews.
• Establish best practices for code quality, testing, documentation, CI/CD, code reviews, and engineering workflows.
• Design production evaluations, observability, and monitoring for LLM-powered systems.
• Partner with product, customer success, founders, and customers to identify problems and shape new products.
• Make pragmatic architectural decisions that balance speed, quality, scalability, and the realities of an early-stage company.
• Help define the company’s engineering culture, technical roadmap, and long-term development standards.

Required Qualifications

• At least 8 years of professional software-engineering experience, ideally within the 8-15-year range. ]
• Bachelors degree in a Computer Science program or STEM degree preferred.
• Experience serving as a staff engineer, founding engineer, technical lead, or de facto technical anchor for an engineering team.
• Demonstrated success leading large technical projects and coordinating the work of other engineers.
• Strong full-stack product-engineering experience with the ability to own features across the frontend, backend, infrastructure, and deployment.
• Recent hands-on experience - within the last one to two years - shipping LLM-powered features or AI agents into production.
• Experience building and launching zero-to-one, customer-facing products.
• Strong product judgment and the ability to translate ambiguous customer needs into practical technical solutions.
• Experience mentoring junior engineers and raising standards for code quality, testing, reviews, and engineering processes.
• A record of writing and shipping production code in a recent role.
• Strong communication skills and experience partnering with product leaders, customers, customer-success teams, and founders.
• Ability to work onsite in San Francisco every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday.

Backend-leaning full-stack engineers are encouraged to apply, provided they can independently own and deliver complete product features.

Technology Environment:

The current technology environment includes:

• Python
• TypeScript
• React
• SQL
• LLMs and agentic AI frameworks
• LangSmith
• Braintrust
• Weights & Biases
• CI/CD and cloud infrastructure
• AI evaluation and observability systems

Experience with every listed technology is not required. Strong engineering fundamentals, full-stack product ownership, and recent production AI experience are more important than an exact tool match.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience at an early-stage startup, ideally between seed and Series B.
• Experience as a founding engineer or early technical hire.
• A combination of startup experience and time within a larger organization with mature engineering practices.
• Experience building multi-step agentic pipelines.
• Experience implementing AI evaluations or LLM observability in production.
• Experience with LangSmith, Braintrust, Weights & Biases, or comparable tools.
• A computer science degree or equivalent professional experience.
• Genuine interest in healthcare, biotechnology, life sciences, or clinical research.

Why Join:

• Build AI products that can directly reduce the time required to bring new medicines to patients.
• Join a seed-stage company with strong funding, demonstrated customer adoption, and meaningful early traction.
• Own high-impact products from concept through production.
• Help shape the architecture, processes, and engineering culture from the ground up.
• Work directly with company leadership and customers.
• Remain deeply hands-on while mentoring and influencing a growing engineering organization.
• Receive meaningful equity and the opportunity to have a company-level impact.

Who Will Thrive Here

This role is best suited for an experienced, product-minded individual contributor who enjoys building from the ground up, creating structure where little exists, and helping junior engineers grow.

It is not a fit for a pure people manager who is no longer writing code, an engineer focused exclusively on deep infrastructure, or someone whose experience has been limited to narrowly defined work within highly structured, large-company environments.