Principal / Staff Software Engineer
Oakland, CA Hybrid (3 days/week onsite)
The Opportunity
We re partnering with a profitable, rapidly growing platform at the intersection of healthcare, education, and AI. This is a rare opportunity to join as a founding-level engineer alongside a newly appointed CTO, shaping the next generation of intelligent systems in a high-impact, data-rich environment.
The product is already widely adopted by physicians across the U.S., with a strong network effect and a multi-sided marketplace connecting medical professionals, content creators, and enterprise partners. The next phase focuses on AI-driven intelligence, personalization, and workflow automation at scale.
Why This Role Exists
A new CTO has just joined and is building out a small, elite engineering team from the ground up. This is the first senior IC hire, with significant influence over architecture, technical direction, and product innovation.
You ll operate in a true 0 1 to 1 N environment:
- Early stage: rapid prototyping, experimentation, and validation
- Scaling phase: productionizing systems and collaborating with a distributed team
This is an evergreen mandate to hire exceptional engineers (multiple hires planned) the bar is extremely high.
What You ll Do
This is a deeply hands-on role with full ownership across the stack:
- Design and build scalable systems end-to-end from architecture to production
- Develop agentic AI workflows leveraging LLMs and proprietary datasets
- Build intelligent knowledge systems that operate on high-volume, domain-specific data
- Drive growth and engagement engineering, including personalization and marketing systems
- Partner closely with product and leadership to validate new ideas directly with users
- Collaborate cross-functionally and with a high-performing international engineering team
Tech Stack
- Backend: Python, Django
- Frontend: React
- Cloud: AWS
- Database: PostgreSQL
- AI/ML: OpenAI + emerging agent frameworks
What We re Looking For
- Principal/Staff-level engineer with a builder mindset
- Proven experience owning systems end-to-end in ambiguous environments
- Strong backend or full-stack capabilities (Python preferred)
- Experience designing data-intensive or knowledge-driven systems
- Familiarity with LLMs, agent frameworks, or applied AI workflows
- Ability to move between rapid experimentation and product ionization
Nice to have:
- Experience with healthcare or regulated datasets
- Exposure to growth engineering or marketing systems
Why This Role Stands Out
- Founding engineer-level impact with direct access to the CTO
- Opportunity to build AI-first systems from scratch in a complex domain
- Already-scaled product with millions of data points not a greenfield gamble
- Rare combination of profitability, scale, and technical ambition
Compensation
- Base salary: $280K $350K (flexible up to ~$400K for exceptional candidates)
- Bonus + meaningful equity
Additional Details
- Location: Oakland, CA (3 days onsite: Mon/Wed/Fri)
If you re interested in building high-impact AI systems in a real-world, data-rich environment while working in a small, elite team this is an exceptional opportunity to do so.
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