Staff Software Engineer

Staff Software Engineer — AI/LLM Products

Full-Time | San Francisco, CA | Hybrid: Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday In Office

Base Salary: $210,000–$265,000 | Equity: 1%–1.5%

Talent Stack is supporting a confidential, venture-backed healthcare AI company in its search for a Staff Software Engineer. This is not an internal position with Talent Stack. The selected candidate will join our client’s engineering team directly.

About the Company

Our client is building AI-powered technology that helps clinical research sites and life sciences companies activate and run clinical trials faster.

Clinical trial execution remains one of the largest bottlenecks in developing new medicines. The company’s platform helps research sites identify appropriate trials, streamline trial activation, and manage operational workflows more efficiently. It also gives pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies better visibility into activity across their research sites.

The company is at the seed stage, has raised more than $7 million, and has already gained adoption across more than 400 research sites. This is a small, high-impact team where engineers work directly with founders, customers, and product leaders to build new products from the ground up.

About the Role

We are looking for a hands-on Staff Software Engineer with at least eight years of professional software-engineering experience.

You will serve as the technical anchor for a small engineering team building AI agents and LLM-powered products that accelerate clinical trials. This is a staff-level individual-contributor position—not a traditional engineering-management role.

You will write and review production code daily, own products from concept through deployment, and mentor three junior engineers. You will also help establish the engineering practices, architectural standards, and team processes needed as the company grows.

The ideal candidate is a backend-leaning full-stack product engineer who can operate across frontend, backend, infrastructure, and data systems. You should be equally comfortable designing an agentic workflow, reviewing a pull request, partnering with customers, and making pragmatic architectural decisions in an early-stage environment.

What You’ll Do

• Own AI-powered products from initial customer problem through architecture, implementation, deployment, and iteration
• Build production LLM features, AI agents, and multi-step agentic workflows
• Establish evaluation frameworks and observability for LLM-powered products
• Develop full-stack applications across frontend, backend, infrastructure, integrations, and data pipelines
• Write, review, test, and ship production code every day
• Serve as the technical lead for major projects and coordinate the work of other engineers
• Mentor three junior engineers and demonstrate what strong engineering execution looks like
• Establish practical standards for code quality, testing, code reviews, CI/CD, documentation, and release processes
• Partner directly with the CTO, founders, product, and customer-success teams
• Speak with customers and translate operational problems into new zero-to-one products
• Make architectural decisions that balance speed, quality, maintainability, and business needs
• Help shape the company’s engineering culture, technical roadmap, and hiring standards

Required Qualifications

• At least 8+ years of professional software-engineering experience
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related STEM discipline—or equivalent professional experience
• Strong full-stack product-engineering background with the ability to own features across frontend, backend, and infrastructure
• Experience serving as a technical lead, Staff Engineer, Founding Engineer, or de facto technical anchor
• Demonstrated success leading major projects and coordinating the work of other engineers
• Recent hands-on experience shipping an LLM-powered feature or AI agent into production
• Experience building customer-facing, zero-to-one software products
• Experience directly mentoring junior engineers
• Track record of improving code quality, testing, code-review practices, or engineering processes
• Strong product judgment and the ability to make pragmatic technical decisions
• Experience partnering with product managers, founders, customer-success teams, or customers
• Willingness to remain deeply hands-on and write and review production code daily
• Ability to work from the company’s San Francisco Financial District office every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday
• Legal authorization to work in the United States independently or through an eligible visa transfer

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working at an early-stage company, ideally from seed through Series B
• Experience as a founding engineer or one of the first engineers at a startup
• A combination of startup experience and time at a larger company where you learned how strong engineering organizations operate at scale
• Experience designing multi-step agentic workflows or orchestration pipelines
• Experience implementing production LLM evaluations, monitoring, or observability
• Familiarity with LangSmith, Braintrust, Weights & Biases, or similar evaluation platforms
• Experience with Python, TypeScript, React, SQL, and modern cloud infrastructure
• Experience with CI/CD, data pipelines, APIs, and distributed systems
• Master's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related STEM discipline—or equivalent professional experience
• Genuine interest in biotechnology, life sciences, healthcare, or clinical research

Technology Environment

The current environment includes:

• Python
• TypeScript
• React
• SQL
• LLMs and generative AI
• Agentic AI frameworks
• LangSmith
• Braintrust
• Weights & Biases
• CI/CD and cloud infrastructure
• Data pipelines and third-party integrations

Direct experience with every technology is not required. Strong engineering fundamentals, product ownership, and the ability to learn quickly are more important than matching every tool.

Compensation and Work Arrangement

• Base salary: $210,000–$265,000
• Equity: 1%–1.5%
• Employment type: Full-time
• Location: San Francisco, California
• Work arrangement: Hybrid, with required office attendance Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday
• Visa support: Eligible H-1B transfers may be considered; candidates currently working under OPT may also be considered

Confidentiality

Talent Stack is managing this search on behalf of a confidential client. The company’s identity and additional details will be shared with qualified candidates during the recruiting process.

If you are a hands-on technical leader who has shipped production AI products, enjoys mentoring engineers, and wants meaningful ownership in an early-stage healthcare company, we would like to hear from you.