Staff Software Engineer

About the role

Who is Recruiting from Scratch:

Recruiting from Scratch is a specialized talent firm dedicated to helping companies build exceptional teams. We partner closely with our clients to deeply understand their needs, then connect them with top-tier candidates who are not only highly skilled but also the right fit for the company’s culture and vision. Our mission is simple: place the best people in the right roles to drive long-term success for both clients and candidates.

https://www.recruitingfromscratch.com/

Staff Software Engineer, Product

Location: San Francisco, CA

Company Stage of Funding: Startup

Office Type: Onsite

Salary: $240,000–$270,000 + Equity

Company Description

We're representing a fast-growing AI infrastructure company behind one of the world's most widely used LLM gateways. Its open-source platform provides a standardized interface for accessing 100+ LLM providers and is trusted by major organizations across technology, media, government, and enterprise environments.

With such a broad integration surface and significant open-source contribution volume, product quality is a core infrastructure problem. The company is hiring a Staff Engineer to own quality across testing, CI, release infrastructure, and provider integrations—building systems that automatically catch regressions and upstream model-provider changes without slowing engineering velocity.

This is a deeply technical individual contributor role for an engineer who wants to remain in the code while setting the quality bar across a high-scale AI developer platform.

What You Will Do

Own product end-to-end across a platform integrating with more than 100 LLM providers.

Design and build comprehensive provider conformance testing covering streaming, tool calling, structured outputs, authentication, error mapping, and cost tracking.

Build and own CI infrastructure that is fast, deterministic, and reliable enough to serve as a true release gate.

Develop automated testing strategies that accommodate a large volume of external and open-source contributions.

Build canary testing and synthetic traffic systems that identify upstream provider changes before they impact customers.

Design release infrastructure that enables rapid daily shipping while maintaining stable release channels for enterprise customers.

Debug complex failures across unfamiliar code paths, third-party integrations, and provider APIs.

Perform deep root-cause analysis and convert escaped production defects into permanent regression coverage.

Improve testing architecture, developer tooling, and release workflows without introducing unnecessary process or slowing engineering velocity.

Raise the technical bar through hands-on coding, architecture decisions, debugging, and code reviews.

Ideal Background

Senior-to-Staff level software engineering experience with deep technical ownership of production systems.

Experience working at a Seed through Series D startup and comfort operating across multiple areas as priorities change.

Proven experience building test, CI, release, or developer infrastructure for complex production software.

Experience supporting products with a large external integration or API surface.

Strong debugging ability with a track record of identifying underlying root causes rather than patching symptoms.

Experience designing automated test suites engineers trust enough to gate production releases.

Strong understanding of CI/CD, release engineering, integration testing, and production reliability.

Track record of improving engineering quality without becoming a bottleneck to shipping.

Experience contributing to or maintaining open-source software.

Comfortable taking organization-level technical ownership as an individual contributor.

Preferred

Experience maintaining CI or release infrastructure for a large open-source project with significant outside contribution volume.

Experience building infrastructure around third-party APIs where upstream behavior can change unexpectedly.

Background in AI infrastructure, LLM platforms, developer tools, API gateways, or cloud infrastructure.

Experience testing LLM functionality including streaming, tool/function calling, structured outputs, and model-provider error handling.

Strong Python experience.

Experience designing canary releases, synthetic monitoring, or automated production validation systems.

Familiarity with multi-channel release strategies balancing rapid iteration with enterprise stability.

Meaningful GitHub or other public open-source contributions.

Strong opinions about testing architecture, engineering quality, and what makes automated test infrastructure genuinely trustworthy.

Compensation and Benefits

Base salary: $240,000–$270,000.

Competitive equity package.

Onsite position in San Francisco.

Deep technical IC role with ownership over product quality rather than a process-heavy QA function.

Opportunity to build quality and release infrastructure for an AI gateway supporting 100+ LLM APIs.

Work on infrastructure used by major organizations while contributing to a highly visible open-source ecosystem.

High-ownership startup environment where engineering quality is driven through code, automation, and strong technical judgment rather than additional process.