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Software Engineer, AI & Data Systems


Job Location:

San Francisco, CA - USA

Monthly Salary: $ 200000 - 280000
Posted: 19 August 2026 (30+ days ago)
Application Deadline: 16 November 2026
Vacancies: 1 Vacancy

Job Summary

Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers software and hardware talent at innovative companies. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across the United States to help them hire.
Software Engineer AI & Data Systems
Location - San Francisco CA (On-site) - Five days per week in-office in San Francisco.
Compensation - $200000 $280000 Base Competitive Equity
Visa - Open to Visa Transfers (OPT H1B Transfers)
Company Stage - Early Stage $5.7M Funding
Industry -Artificial Intelligence Data Infrastructure Machine Learning AI Agents Identity Data Enterprise Software
About the Company

Our client is building a next-generation data infrastructure platform that uses autonomous AI agents to collect process and continuously update large-scale identity and business data across the open web.

The platform is building a living identity graph spanning billions of individuals and hundreds of millions of businesses providing contextual data infrastructure for next-generation AI applications.

The company is experiencing rapid growth with strong revenue momentum and is backed by leading venture investors. The team is intentionally small giving engineers significant ownership over both customer-facing products and core infrastructure.

The organization operates at the intersection of AI agents data infrastructure distributed systems and identity intelligence.

As a Software Engineer AI & Data Systems youll work across backend engineering high-volume data pipelines AI agents infrastructure and customer-facing product surfaces.

This is an opportunity to join a highly autonomous engineering team where youll take ambiguous customer problems make architecture decisions ship production software and own systems end-to-end.

What Youll Do
  • Build and ship customer-facing products across backend data infrastructure and frontend surfaces
  • Build core platform capabilities supporting large-scale identity and data systems
  • Design and operate high-volume data pipelines processing massive amounts of information
  • Build scalable backend services and APIs supporting customer-facing products
  • Develop AI agents agent harnesses and developer tooling
  • Build reliable systems for operating AI agents at very large scale
  • Design distributed systems capable of handling high-volume data workloads
  • Build and maintain data models and processing workflows
  • Develop infrastructure supporting large-scale data collection and processing
  • Work with LLMs and modern AI frameworks to build AI-native systems
  • Improve the reliability observability security and scalability of production systems
  • Make architecture decisions and clearly communicate technical tradeoffs
  • Iterate system designs as assumptions requirements and customer needs change
  • Own software systems from initial concept through deployment and production operations
  • Work directly with founders to shape product and technical direction
  • Work directly with customers to understand ambiguous problems and translate them into product decisions
  • Turn vague customer requirements into clear technical solutions and shipped software
  • Collaborate across product infrastructure data and engineering functions
  • Use modern AI development tools aggressively while maintaining strong engineering judgment
  • Debug and operate production systems independently
  • Contribute to engineering standards architecture and technical strategy
  • Operate with high ownership in a small fast-moving startup environment
Ideal Candidate Background
Experience Requirements
  • 16 years of professional experience in backend engineering data engineering product engineering or AI systems
  • Experience building and operating production systems end-to-end
  • Experience owning systems from concept through deployment and ongoing operations
  • Experience working in high-growth talent-dense early-stage startup environments
  • Experience at SeedSeries B startups preferred
  • Experience building high-volume data pipelines
  • Experience building AI agents data systems or identity/matching systems at scale
  • Experience building customer-facing products and infrastructure
  • Experience working with distributed systems and large-scale data
  • Experience operating production systems with strong reliability and observability
  • Strong ownership mentality with demonstrated independent execution
  • Comfortable turning ambiguous problems into clear technical decisions
  • Comfortable working directly with founders and customers
  • Strong product engineering mindset
  • Comfortable operating in a highly autonomous startup environment
Technical Requirements
  • Strong backend engineering fundamentals
  • Strong Python engineering experience
  • Experience building APIs and backend services
  • Experience designing and working with data models
  • Experience with distributed systems
  • Experience building and operating high-volume data pipelines
  • Experience with cloud infrastructure
  • Experience building production AI systems
  • Experience working with LLMs
  • Experience with AI agents or agent frameworks
  • Experience building agent harnesses or AI developer tools preferred
  • Experience with large-scale data processing
  • Experience designing reliable production systems
  • Strong understanding of scalability reliability and observability
  • Experience with production debugging and system operations
  • Strong software architecture and systems thinking
  • Strong computer science and software engineering fundamentals
  • Ability to reason about system tradeoffs and architecture decisions
Education
  • Bachelors degree in Computer Science or related technical field preferred
  • CS degree from a strong/top technical university preferred
  • Strong computer science distributed systems and software engineering fundamentals
  • Equivalent practical engineering experience may be considered
Soft Skills
  • Exceptional technical ownership
  • Strong product judgment
  • Strong analytical and problem-solving ability
  • Deep technical curiosity
  • Comfortable working with ambiguity
  • Strong communication skills
  • Comfortable working directly with founders
  • Comfortable working directly with customers
  • High execution velocity
  • Strong attention to system reliability and engineering quality
  • Bias toward experimentation and continuous improvement
  • Strong ability to reason from first principles
  • Strong decision-making ability with incomplete information
  • Low-ego collaborative mentality
  • Strong builder mentality
  • Comfortable operating independently
  • Comfortable using modern AI tools to accelerate development
  • Strong engineering judgment despite aggressive AI-assisted development
  • Comfortable working in a small high-performing startup team
  • Willingness to work five days per week in San Francisco
Compensation & Benefits
  • Base Salary: $200000 $280000
  • Competitive Equity Package
  • Opportunity to build AI-native data infrastructure at massive scale
  • Significant ownership over customer-facing products and core platform systems
  • Opportunity to work directly with founders
  • Exposure to large-scale AI agents and autonomous data collection
  • Opportunity to build high-volume data pipelines and distributed systems
  • Opportunity to work on identity and matching systems at massive scale
  • High-growth early-stage startup environment
  • Opportunity to influence architecture and technical direction
  • High level of autonomy and ownership
  • Opportunity to work across backend AI data infrastructure and product engineering
Why Join

This is an opportunity to join a highly ambitious AI and data infrastructure company building systems that operate at massive scale across the open web.

Youll work on the intersection of autonomous AI agents distributed systems large-scale data pipelines and customer-facing products while helping build a continuously evolving identity data platform.

As part of a tiny engineering team youll have significant ownership over architecture product decisions and production systems. Youll work directly with founders and customers and have the opportunity to see your work move from an ambiguous problem to a shipped product quickly.

If you enjoy backend engineering AI agents distributed systems large-scale data and high-ownership startup environments this role offers exceptional technical depth autonomy and impact.


Required Experience:

IC


About Company

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