Staff Software Engineer

Intelletec; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Intelletec is seeking a senior production engineer to set the technical direction for a core domain, aligning with the CTO and guiding architecture across multiple teams.

You will recruit top engineers, own RFCs, and contribute hands-on to ship production-grade code while solving complex distributed-system challenges.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of production engineering experience with 3+ years at senior/staff level influencing system-wide technical decisions.
• Built and owned at least one large-scale distributed system (10M+ users, sub-second latency, multi-service).
• Deep expertise in either AI/ML systems (LLM serving, evaluation frameworks, agent runtimes, RAG at scale) or high-scale data infrastructure (real-time aggregation, streaming, event-driven architecture).
• Extreme AI fluency with strong opinions on model architectures, evaluation methodologies, and where the AI capability curve is heading.
• Technical leadership through influence, not authority, aligning senior engineers on approaches through clarity and evidence.
• Preferred startup experience and significant open-source contributions or published technical work.

Responsibilities

• Define the technical direction for a critical domain: AI platform layer or consumer product + data layer.
• Make architecture decisions that affect the entire engineering team and own RFCs.
• Be the technical peer to our CTO, push back when you disagree, drive technical clarity.
• Recruit: attract senior engineers and leverage your network.
• Ship code: write, review, and debug production issues.

Skills

Production engineering

Systems design

Software architecture

Technical leadership

RFC ownership

Code review

Job description

• Define the technical direction for a critical domain: either (a) the AI platform layer (orchestration, evaluation, multi-model routing, hallucination mitigation) or (b) the consumer product + data layer (aggregation, enrichment, real-time sync, dynamic UI generation).
• Make architecture decisions that affect the entire engineering team. Own technical RFCs. Set the quality bar.
• Be the technical peer to our CTO in your domain. Push back when you disagree. Drive technical clarity.
• Recruit. The best staff engineers attract senior engineers. Bring your network. Be the person others want to work with.
• Ship code. This is not an advisory role. You write code, review code, and debug production issues.

What We’re Looking For

• 8+ years of production engineering with 3+ years at senior/staff level influencing system-wide technical decisions
• Have built and owned at least one large-scale distributed system (10M+ users, sub-second latency, multi-service)
• Deep expertise in either: (a) AI/ML systems (LLM serving, evaluation frameworks, agent runtimes, RAG at scale) or (b) high-scale data infrastructure (real-time aggregation, streaming, event-driven architecture)
• Extreme AI fluency. Not just using tools — has strong opinions about model architectures, evaluation methodologies, and where the AI capability curve is heading
• Technical leadership through influence, not authority. Can get senior engineers aligned on an approach through clarity and evidence
• Preferred: Startup experience. Deep open-source contributions or significant published technical work.