Staff Software Engineer, Product

About the Role

Join an early-stage government HR technology startup as a hands-on technical lead shaping product direction and building full-stack features. You will help modernize how public-sector organizations manage their workforce, including through practical AI-powered experiences.

What You'll Do

• Own product features from data modeling and API design through frontend development, release, and rollout.

• Build AI-powered experiences, including chat interfaces, LLM tool-calling integrations, and useful ways to present generated insights.

• Lead a small product engineering pod, setting technical direction and mentoring while remaining primarily hands-on.

• Develop search, filtering, normalization, and other product surfaces over complex workforce data.

• Strengthen engineering practices through thoughtful reviews, architecture decisions, and pragmatic standards.

What We're Looking For

• Seven or more years building and shipping software products, with sustained staff-level technical ownership in a product domain.

• Strong full-stack experience with TypeScript, Node.js, React, Tailwind CSS, Postgres data modeling, and API design.

• Production experience building AI or LLM-powered features, such as agents, retrieval-augmented generation, tool-calling, or streaming.

• Experience mentoring engineers as a player-coach and working at startups through periods of growth.

• Relevant academic or professional background in the product domain, and experience building software before AI coding tools became widely used.

• Clear, proactive communication skills, including the ability to ask questions and push back constructively.

• Experience with TanStack, Next.js, Drizzle, background jobs or durable workflows, and tools such as Vercel AI SDK, VoltAgent, Mastra, Trigger.dev, or Temporal is valuable. Open-source contributions to widely used tools are also a plus.

Compensation & Benefits

Annual salary range: $202,000 to $262,000 USD. Visa sponsorship is available.

Location

Hybrid, with San Francisco, United States as the primary location.