Staff Software Engineer

daydream; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage including medical, dental, and vision

Monthly commuter reimbursement

Lunch reimbursement on office days

Annual wellness stipend

Annual learning stipend

Team retreats twice a year

Regular team dinners and outings

Job summary

A progressive tech company in San Francisco is seeking a Staff Engineer to provide technical leadership and oversee backend systems development. In this role, you will partner closely with the CTO to design system architecture and influence engineering processes while maintaining high standards for code quality. Candidates are expected to have significant experience managing production software systems and strong decision-making skills. The position offers competitive compensation along with substantial equity.

Qualifications

• Significant experience in building and operating production software systems.
• Strong engineering judgment with architectural trade-offs.
• Ability to lead through influence and technical decision-making.

Responsibilities

• Act as technical lead for engineering execution.
• Partner with CTO for engineering work organization and prioritization.
• Design and evolve core system architecture.

Skills

Technical leadership

Backend systems expertise

Engineering judgment

Code quality assessment

Python programming

TypeScript knowledge

C# experience

Tools

Google Cloud

Job description

daydream is building the world’s best SEO agent, paired with the top 1% of human experts. We own organic search end-to-end, so customers don’t have to hire specialized teams, evaluate tools, or manage agencies.

Winning in search now requires producing expert-level content at scale and adapting continuously as ranking systems and user behavior change. Existing tools surface metrics without making decisions, and agencies depend on slow, manual workflows that don’t compound. Even well‑resourced teams struggle to turn sustained effort into reliable growth.

daydream replaces fragmented tools and external vendors with a single system that plans and executes SEO continuously. The SEO agent handles analysis, planning, and generation, while experienced Growth Leads convert that work into shipped pages, technical fixes, and updated priorities, and remain accountable for performance over time.

We’ve raised over $20M from First Round Capital, Basis Set Ventures, WndrCo, and SOMA Capital, and are backed by growth leaders from Notion, Airtable, Webflow, and Dropbox, including Lenny Rachitsky and Eli Schwartz, author of Product‑Led SEO.

The Team

You’ll work closely with a small, senior team across engineering, design, and growth:

• Shravan (CTO), formerly an Engineering Lead at Flixed and a Software Engineer at Facebook, where he worked on mass‑scale web scraping for Facebook Jobs and Meta Reality Labs.
• Vishruth (Founding Applied AI Engineer), previously a Data Scientist at Klaviyo specializing in NLP, with a research background from Cornell.
• Daniel (Founding Applied AI Engineer), formerly a Data Engineer on Tesla’s Autopilot team, working on large‑scale data systems and applied machine learning, and previously Lead Data Engineer at Replit.
• Tom (Founding Designer), who previously led product design at Blockless and contributes to UI engineering.

You’ll also work directly with Growth Leads; senior SEO practitioners who operate the system daily and provide tight feedback loops on how the AI performs in real execution.

How you’ll make an impact

As a Staff Engineer at daydream, you’ll provide technical leadership across the product while remaining deeply hands‑on.

You’ll partner closely with the CTO to shape system architecture, guide execution, and raise the quality bar across the engineering organization. This is not a people‑management role; you’ll lead through design decisions, code quality, and consistent delivery of scalable systems.

In this role, you will

• Act as the technical lead for day‑to‑day engineering execution across the team
• Partner with the CTO to organize, prioritize, and sequence engineering work
• Design and evolve core system architecture, guiding implementation decisions
• Review pull requests and set standards for code quality, reliability, and maintainability
• Identify technical risks early and propose pragmatic, scalable solutions
• Mentor engineers through technical guidance, feedback, and example
• Improve engineering workflows to increase speed without sacrificing quality
• Work primarily across backend systems, data pipelines, and AI‑enabled services, using Python, TypeScript, and C#, deployed on Google Cloud

Minimum Qualifications

• Significant experience building and operating production software systems
• Strong engineering judgment and comfort with making architectural tradeoffs
• Experience owning systems end‑to‑end, from design through long‑term maintenance
• Ability to lead through influence, code, and technical decision‑making rather than people management

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in a Staff or Senior Engineer role at a high‑growth company
• Background in building distributed systems or complex backend platforms
• Familiarity with AI‑enabled or data‑intensive systems
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• A consistently high bar for code quality, reliability, and technical excellence

Position Location:

This role is based in our Hayes Valley office in San Francisco and requires in‑person collaboration five (5) days per week. We offer paid relocation for candidates outside the San Francisco Bay Area.

Compensation: The base salary range for this role is $200,000- 280,000, depending on experience, along with meaningful equity in daydream.

What You’ll Love

• Health coverage includes medical, dental, and vision with HSA and FSA options, plus One Medical, Talkspace, and Teladoc
• Commuter benefit includes a monthly reimbursement to support your commute to the office
• Meals on us include lunch reimbursement on in‑office days, with dinner covered when you're working late
• Personal well‑being includes an annual stipend for gym, fitness classes, therapy, and wellness expenses
• Learning and development includes an annual stipend for books, courses, and classes to support your growth
• Team retreats include two company retreats per year to connect, collaborate, and reset
• Monthly team time includes regular dinners and outings to spend time together