Staff Software Engineer

About the Company

Everyone's building on top of the models. Almost nobody's fixing the thing they're starved of - data. This is the company doing it. I'm running a search for a Staff Full-Stack Engineer at the first dedicated audio-data research company - and it's one of the rare AI seats where the traction is already real, not a pitch. Founded in 2024 by ex-Scale AI engineers who watched, up close, high-quality audio become the bottleneck for the next wave of AI. Here's the part that's hard to ignore: in under a year they've signed most of the FAANG names and the top AI labs as customers, hit eight-figure revenue, and raised a $50M Series B with NVIDIA on the cap table. Most startups spend three years trying to prove someone wants the thing. They're already past that.

About the Role

So the leverage is unusual. It's ~66 people, and the systems you'd build feed the models being trained at the biggest labs on earth. Your code, in the training pipeline for the frontier. That's not a line you get to write often. This is a build role, not a manage role. You'd own the technical calls for the org while staying hands-on-keyboard — shipping products 0-to-1 across the stack, deciding fast with limited data, and building systems that move terabytes of audio. Real staff-level authority, real equity while the number's still early, and research engineers next to you instead of three floors away.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical calls for the organization.
• Stay hands-on-keyboard while shipping products 0-to-1 across the stack.
• Decide fast with limited data.
• Build systems that move terabytes of audio.

Required Skills

• A Computer Science degree from a "Top 30" US program (or equivalent)
• 6+ years product-focused full-stack experience (they level on the way in, so a strong senior isn't ruled out).
• Genuinely fluent in both TypeScript and Python.
• Has actually owned something 0-to-1 - designed it, decided it, shipped it.
• Did real time at a startup while it was scaling hard.

Disqualifiers

• Pure big-tech experience with no startup exposure, tends not to translate here.
• Inability to work in a limited-data, move-fast, own-the-outcome environment.

Pay range, Visa and compensation package

$220K–$260K base plus equity. Five days a week onsite in San Francisco. H1B visa sponsorship on the table for the right person.

If it's you, or it's someone you'd vouch for, drop me a message!