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Staff Software Engineer, Product Quality


Job Location:

San Francisco, CA - USA

Monthly Salary: $ 240000 - 270000
Posted: 13 August 2026 (22 days ago)
Application Deadline: 10 November 2026
Vacancies: 1 Vacancy

Job Summary

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 companys 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.
Software Engineer Product Quality

Location: San Francisco CA
Company Stage of Funding: Startup
Office Type: Onsite
Salary: $240000$270000 Equity

Company Description

Were representing a fast-growing AI infrastructure company behind one of the worlds 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 integrationsbuilding 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 quality 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: $240000$270000.
  • 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.
Salary Range: $240000-$270000 base.

About Company

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