Staff/Principal Software Engineer

About the company Our client is a profitable, fast-growing go-to-market software company backed by more than $250M in funding. Its platform pairs one of the largest B2B contact databases in the industry, over 210 million contacts and 35 million companies, with an AI-native engine that helps sales, marketing, and revenue teams find prospects, engage customers, and close deals. More than 500,000 companies and millions of users run on it today. The team is now rebuilding the entire product around AI and agents, with real scale and real revenue already underneath them. Engineers treat AI-assisted development as core to the craft, using agents to move faster on design, investigation, and implementation. About the role This is a senior individual contributor seat with unusual reach. You will own technical direction for a significant area of the platform, either large-scale distributed systems or agent-centric AI products, and work hand-in-hand with VPs and C-suite engineering leaders on the highest-priority problems in the company. What you will do • Own the architecture and technical direction for a significant area of the platform, either large-scale distributed systems or agent-centric AI products • Lead the hardest technical problems, making the build, buy, and cost tradeoffs that shape the entire engineering organization • Set standards and patterns that raise the bar across multiple teams and multiply the output of the engineers around you • Partner with engineering and product leadership to keep technical direction tied to business outcomes • Use AI-assisted development as a first-class part of how you work, leaning on agents for design, investigation, and implementation • Float across the highest-priority projects as the go-to individual contributor in the room What we are looking for • 8 to 15 years in backend or full-stack engineering, building large-scale distributed systems • A track record of owning and operating systems in production at serious scale, serving 100,000+ users • Clear upward trajectory in scope rather than a plateau at senior level • Strong system design instincts for large-scale data and distributed systems • Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools such as Copilot or Cursor Nice to have • Experience building LLM-based or agent-centric products • Familiarity with Ruby on Rails, Python, MongoDB, or Elasticsearch • Infrastructure-as-code experience with Terraform • A strong database or data engineering background that has broadened into distributed systems • Base salary of $217,000 to $410,000, depending on level and experience • Competitive equity • Hybrid schedule with three days per week in the San Francisco office • Open to visa transfers, including OPT and H-1B transfers • Two hires planned for this role, at Staff and Principal level • High-autonomy environment with direct exposure to engineering and executive leadership