Staff Software Engineer

Harrison Clarke; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Harrison Clarke partners with a Series A startup building agentic infrastructure for enterprise workflows. This role focuses on real-time coordination, distributed state, and reliable execution across multi-step processes for large organizations.

We seek engineers who can design and operate real-time distributed systems, storage, and data movement at scale, delivering low-latency backend components that power autonomous agents in complex enterprise environments.

Qualifications

• Built or scaled real-time, fault-tolerant systems.
• Experience with distributed databases or storage engines.
• Experience delivering enterprise-grade infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate real-time distributed systems for enterprise workflows.
• Develop durable storage and state management components.
• Build low-latency inference infrastructure for model/tool calls.
• Ensure reliability and SLAs in production environments.

Skills

Distributed systems

Fault tolerance

Real-time processing

Enterprise software

Job description

We're partnering with a Series A company building agentic infrastructure for enterprise workflows. Not another copilot or chatbot - they're solving the hard backend problems that make autonomous agents actually work inside large organizations: real-time coordination, distributed state, reliable execution across complex multi-step workflows.

They're backed by leading venture firms and the engineering team is still early enough that the people who join now will shape the technical direction.

What You'd Be Building

• Real-time distributed systems - event-driven architectures that coordinate autonomous agents across enterprise workflows with strict reliability guarantees
• Distributed storage & state management - durable, consistent backends that let agents maintain context, memory, and workflow state across long-running enterprise processes
• Large-scale data movement - ingestion, transformation, and routing of enterprise data at the volumes and velocities that production agentic systems demand
• Low-latency inference infrastructure - execution layers that keep model calls, tool invocations, and agent-to-agent communication fast enough for real-time enterprise use cases

What We're Looking For

• Distributed systems is your core identity - you've built or scaled real-time, fault-tolerant systems and you think in terms of consensus, replication, backpressure, and failure modes
• Backend & infrastructure depth - you've worked on storage engines, streaming pipelines, distributed databases, or large-scale data platforms at companies where these problems were the product
• Production at scale - you've operated systems that couldn't go down, handled millions of events, or moved data at volumes where the easy approach stops working
• Enterprise sensibility - you understand (or want to learn) what it takes to ship infrastructure into environments with compliance, SLAs, and integration complexity
• Early-stage energy - you want to build, not maintain. Series A means the core architecture is being decided now

Why Here?

Enterprise software is being rebuilt around agents. But agents that can reliably orchestrate multi-step workflows inside a bank, a hospital system, or a Fortune 500 supply chain need infrastructure that doesn't exist yet. This company is building it - with Series A capital, a sharp founding team, and the kind of problem space where distributed systems expertise is the differentiator.