Staff Software Engineer, Product

Epic Placements; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health coverage

Flexible PTO

AI tooling access

Meals in SF office

Job summary

Epic Placements LLC is seeking a staffing-minded, hands-on Staff-level full-stack engineer to own critical parts of an AI-powered platform. You’ll design and implement user and access management, frontend interfaces, and backend APIs, while shaping the product and engineering practices in a small, founder-led environment.

You’ll collaborate with founders to prioritize features, design scalable data models, ensure reliability, and ship high-impact work to customers.

Qualifications

• Strong React and TypeScript experience with UI focus.
• Backend experience including API design and data modeling.
• Experience shipping substantial work in production.
• Experience in small startups or environments with broad ownership.

Responsibilities

• Own authentication and access, CMS, files and media, email, commerce, or app-building experiences.
• Turn broad requirements into focused products with clear boundaries.
• Build interfaces in React and TypeScript.
• Own APIs, backend logic, and Postgres data model.
• Make reliability, security, and maintainability decisions.
• Ship to real users and improve the experience.
• Use AI coding tools while ensuring code integrity.

Skills

React

TypeScript

Frontend development

Product judgment

API design

Relational data modeling

Production debugging

Shipped work

Startup experience

AI-assisted development

Communication

Tools

PostgreSQL

AI coding tools

Job description

San Francisco, CA | $200,000–$300,000 base + equity | Full-time

The problem you’ll solve:

An authentication system can be technically sound and still leave a business owner unable to add an employee. A CMS can be powerful and still require a developer to make it useful.

Your job is to close that gap.

Our client is building an AI platform that lets businesses create their own operational software—CRMs, inventory systems, HR platforms, and the applications they use to run their companies. The people building with it often have deep knowledge of their businesses and no engineering background.

They need capabilities that work reliably and feel obvious. Making that happen takes serious engineering and thoughtful product decisions.

What they’re looking for

An engineer who can take a goal like “build users and access management” and carry it through to a complete product.

You’ll work with the founders to understand the problem, decide what the first useful version should include, design the experience, build the frontend and backend, and get it into customers’ hands. Then you’ll own what happens next.

The strongest fit is a full-stack engineer with particular strength in frontend development and product judgment. Someone who cares about the interaction a user sees and understands the APIs, permissions, and data model underneath it.

What you’ll own

You could take responsibility for a substantial area of the platform: authentication and access, CMS, files and media, email, commerce, or part of the app-building experience.

That means:

• Turning broad requirements into a focused product with clear boundaries.
• Building simple, considered interfaces in React and TypeScript.
• Owning the supporting APIs, backend logic, and Postgres data model.
• Making decisions about reliability, security, and maintainability.
• Shipping to real users, understanding where they get stuck, and improving the experience.
• Using AI coding tools throughout development while staying accountable for the code and its behavior.

A week might include simplifying a permissions workflow, designing a schema, building the interface, debugging a production issue, and changing your original approach after seeing how customers actually use it.

The environment

This is a small, founder-led, Series A company with substantial customer usage and a growing product surface. Engineering capacity is a real constraint. There is more useful work to do than the current team can deliver.

You’ll work directly with technical founders in a flat organization. Expect short feedback loops, consequential decisions, and room to own the solution.

The pace is demanding. Requirements will sometimes be incomplete. Priorities will evolve. You’ll need to decide what deserves deeper engineering and what can be made simpler so it ships sooner.

This is a deeply hands‑on role. The Staff title comes with responsibility for delivering substantial products.

What would make your background compelling

You’ve owned a meaningful product or module from the initial problem through production launch and subsequent improvements. You can explain what you built, what you personally implemented, the tradeoffs you made, and what happened when people used it.

You likely bring:

• Strong React and TypeScript experience, with an eye for clear interactions and restrained UI.
• Backend experience that includes API design, relational data modeling, and production debugging.
• Several substantial examples of shipped work.
• Experience in a small startup or another environment where engineers own broad outcomes.
• A daily AI-assisted development workflow—and the technical understanding to recognize when generated code is wrong.
• Clear communication about technical decisions, priorities, and progress.

Former founders and founding engineers are especially relevant. So are product engineers who have earned increasing ownership within strong engineering teams.

Most candidates will have roughly 2–10 years of professional experience. Scope and demonstrated ability matter more than an exact year count or your current title. Public projects, open‑source work, and technical writing are welcome; substantive work built inside a company counts just as much.

Why consider it

You’ll help make sophisticated software usable by people who could not previously build it themselves. The work reaches customers running actual businesses, where a better workflow has practical consequences.

You’ll also have the opportunity to shape whole product areas while the team is still small enough for your decisions to materially influence the platform.

Compensation includes $200,000–$300,000 base salary plus equity, with flexibility in the cash/equity mix. The company also offers health coverage, flexible PTO, extensive AI tooling access, and meals in the San Francisco office.

The team prioritizes working together in San Francisco. Exceptional North America‑based remote candidates may be considered individually; this is primarily an onsite search.

The interview process

Expect a short initial conversation, a system‑design interview, a one‑hour live AI‑assisted coding exercise, and a product‑focused discussion.

The process looks at how you reason, build, debug, and simplify—and whether you can take a product from an open‑ended goal to something that works.