Senior / Staff Software Engineer

Company: Confidential - Venture-backed AI research company
Location: San Mateo, CA (in office 4 days per week; flexible hours)
Compensation: $300,000 - $350,000 + competitive equity
Employment Type: Full-time
Visa Sponsorship: H-1B transfers, TN and O-1 sponsored

About the Company

A venture-backed company building AI systems that autonomously conduct AI research, with a commercial product deployed at leading global quantitative trading firms.

The Role

Our client is hiring Senior / Staff Software Engineers (5+ years) to join a tiny, elite team as high-leverage ICs writing production Python that powers recursive self-improvement for the company. You have owned complex projects end to end, write pristine code and operate without hand-holding at a company where iteration speed is the competitive advantage. As one of the first senior engineering hires, you will shape technical direction.

What You Will Do

• Build and optimize the recursive self-improvement pipeline for the company.
• Work on the agentic discovery search system and the post-training stack used for customer-specific models.
• Write high-performance Python that speeds up autonomous research workflows.
• Turn experimental ideas into production systems with researchers and engineers.
• Shape architecture and technical direction.

What You Bring

• 5+ years of software engineering experience
• Ownership of complex projects end to end
• Excellent production Python
• Backend and ML infrastructure experience (GCP a plus)
• Ability to work in the San Mateo office 4 days a week

Tech Stack

Python, Google Cloud Platform, backend infrastructure, production systems, ML infrastructure, AI observability