Technical Lead

QUORE IT : Talent Sourcing & Recruitment; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 156,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

QUORE IT : Talent Sourcing & Recruitment is seeking a Staff Engineer or Team Lead to oversee a backend, cloud, and distributed systems team in San Francisco. You will own engineering decisions, guide architecture, and report to the leadership while shipping scalable, low-latency services.

You will lead a small team of engineers, contribute code, and hire future engineers to scale the platform. This is a hands-on leadership role in a fast-growing startup with strong equity upside.

Qualifications

• Back-end development experience with Python and Postgres.
• Experience leading engineering teams in fast-growing startups.
• Strong background in cloud and distributed systems architecture.

Responsibilities

• Lead the engineering team and own output.
• Make architectural decisions for latency-critical systems.
• Set up engineering best practices and processes; mentor engineers.
• Prioritize tasks to align with business goals; contribute code 20–30% of time.
• Plan hiring for 10+ engineers over the next 12 months.

Skills

Backend development (Python)

Distributed systems

Cloud engineering

Team leadership

Frontend development

Job description

Location: Hybrid at 95 Third Street, 2nd Floor, San Francisco, CA 94103

Comp range: Up to base $260K +Equity (0.15-0.4%)

Interview Process: 3 rounds!

Why you should join

• Traction — YC W25 company that doubled ARR in H1 and is targeting another 2x in H2
• Ground floor of a funded team — $4.7M seed from Nexus Venture Partners and Y Combinator, and 12 people today.
• You own engineering from day one — the engineering function day-to-day, a team of four engineers, and a direct line to the CTO/CEO.
• Equity with revenue behind it — 0.3%–0.7% at seed stage.

Must Have:

• Staff engineer or team lead who made the calls on how a team proceeded with architectural and technical decisions
• Cloud engineering and distributed systems depth

Required:

• Experience in backend, cloud, and distributed systems engineering, with recent time at a staff engineer or team lead level
• Built technically challenging products with real scale, reliability or real- time/latency- critical demands
• Backend development in Python and Postgres
• Interested in leading a team

Nice to Have:

• Experience at a conversational AI or voice AI company
• Ability to work on the frontend

Red Flag:

• Only big tech, no startup experience
• Pure engineering manager profiles, several years removed from hands- on technical decisions
• ML- or data-science-weighted profiles

What we're looking for:

We build voice and SMS AI agents for home improvement companies. Every appointment we book by phone is worth $20k+ for them, generating millions in new revenue for our customers.

We were in the top 1% of our YC batch by growth. Closed an oversubscribed $4.7M seed in 3 days. We doubled ARR in the first half of 2026 and are aiming to double it again by year-end. The current technical team consists of 3 engineers + me.

The role

Lead engineering and report to me. I want to spend less time on code reviews and running the engineering team, and instead talk more to customers to understand the product bottlenecks and its next evolution.

• Lead the engineering team, review code, own team output
• Make architectural decisions (latency-critical distributed system)
• Set up engineering best practices and processes, mentoring
• Task prioritization to support business objectives
• Contribute to the codebase yourself (20-30% of your time)
• Hire >10 engineers over the next 12 months

The technical problem

• Scale and latency. We handle ~3M phone calls a month. We need to be able to grow that exponentially while holding p95 end-to-end latency under 1 second.
• From calls to an operating system. Phone calls and SMS are the atoms that are tied to the long-running campaigns. The goal is an operating system for home improvement and adjacent industries with a CRM expansion.
• Self-improving agents. An agent that watches the voice agents, proposes changes, A/B tests them automatically against live traffic, and promotes or rejects the change. A closed loop with humans only at the edges.

You

• Led a team of 4+ engineers at a fast-growing startup
• See the eng org as a system: find the bottleneck, fix it, find the next one
• Excellent people skills. You enjoy coordinating and talking to people.
• Curiosity and attention to detail
• Passion for building elegant, performant, agentic, latency-critical distributed systems (so many buzzwords, I know)

First 30/60/90 Days

• 0-30: You've paired with me on code reviews and architecture calls. You've shipped code across our voice service, backend, and frontend, so you know the system first-hand. You've had a 1:1 with every engineer and FDE.
• 30-60: You collaborate with me on the eng roadmap and own its execution. I've stopped reviewing most code. Dev productivity and system observability have measurably improved.
• 60-90: Engineering runs without me in the loop day-to-day, and I'm spending that time with customers. You're leading a new product expansion. You hold mentoring sessions with engineers.

How we work

• In person 4 days a week, California Street in SF, with one WFH day.

About hiring manager

In my previous life, I built infrastructure for DALL-E 2 and led an academic research team on autonomous extraterrestrial rovers, as well as worked on the computer vision team for autonomous trucking.