Member of Technical Staff

About the Role

We are hiring Members of Technical Staff internally referred to as Founding Engineers. The mandate is to architect and own the core systems that power real-time AI voice and compliance workflows for top-10 US mortgage lenders. Someone who's a little bit more infra / backend.

The archetype is the engineer who comes in, has an opinion on how the product should actually be built, and starts rebuilding it.

What You'll Own

• Architect and own core systems that power real-time AI voice and compliance workflows.

• Push performance boundaries sub-700ms latency via event-driven architecture and parallel processing.

• Deploy, operate, and scale resilient systems using Kubernetes and distributed sub-systems.

• Build a self-improving AI system that improves with every customer interaction and human feedback.

• Ship fast, ship right whiteboard design to live production in bank environments.

• Set engineering culture and best practices code reviews, docs, architecture decisions.

Requirements

• 3+ years professional engineering experience.

• Strong Python fundamentals.

• Strong backend + infrastructure depth has personally architected production backends, not just shipped within someone else's stack.

• Deep understanding of distributed systems, reliability, fault tolerance.

• Excellent database design and performance optimization.

• Strong opinions on architecture with bias to defensibly rebuild what's wrong.

• Bias for ownership figures things out in messy, high-velocity environments.

• SF-based or willing to relocate immediately 5 days/week.

• Cracked with AI tooling Claude / Cursor / Codex daily.

• Genuine interest in mortgage / lending space documented failure mode.

• Visa: H-1B transfer OK, TN OK (no OPT; O-1 too slow).

Profile Tiers Tier 1 Distributed Systems / Low-Latency Backend at High-Bar Companies

• AWS distributed systems / low-latency teams

• Palantir Foundry infrastructure / platform teams

• Databricks, Snowflake compute layer / infra

• CockroachDB, MongoDB, Confluent, Vespa, Pinecone, Weaviate, Elastic, Clickhouse, Materialize, Neon, PlanetScale, Convex, Supabase infra

• Verkada direct culture and technical match

Tier 2 AI Infrastructure / Voice Infrastructure Engineers

• Anthropic Applied / Production Infra, OpenAI Solutions / Production Infra, Together AI, Fireworks AI, Modal, Replicate, Anyscale, Cohere infra

• Voice infra: Deepgram, Cartesia, ElevenLabs infra, Retell, Vapi, Bland, Air.ai, PolyAI, HappyRobot

• Twilio infra, Vonage infra

• Real-time / sub-second production systems

Tier 3 Ex-YC Founding Engineers with Backend Depth

• YC founders and founding engineers of companies with real backend architecture.

• Especially data-intensive or infra-heavy YC products.

Tier 4 Impressive Fast-Moving Startups with Real Infra

• Perplexity, Cursor, Vercel, Modal, Replicate infra teams

• Mercor, Weap, Sierra, Decagon, Glean, Cresta infra

Tier 5 Compliance-Heavy Vertical AI Infrastructure

• Harvey, Eve, Spellbook legal AI infrastructure

• Blend, Ocrolus, Truework, Snapdocs, Rocket Companies mortgage / lending infra

Tier 6 Big Tech Infrastructure with Zero-to-One Signal Additional Requirements

• 3+ years professional engineering experience.

• Strong Python.

• Deep distributed systems, reliability, fault tolerance understanding.

• Excellent database design and performance optimization.

• Kubernetes production experience.

• Event-driven architecture, parallel processing.

• Sub-second latency systems experience.

• Strong opinions on architecture with defensible push-back ability.

• Bias for ownership in messy, high-velocity environments.

• SF-based or willing to relocate immediately.

• 5 days/week in-person.

• Cracked with AI tooling.

• Genuine interest in mortgage / lending space.

Candidate Scorecard

• 3+ years professional engineering experience.

• Strong Python.

• Deep distributed systems, reliability, fault tolerance understanding.

• Excellent database design and performance optimization.

• Kubernetes production experience.

• Event-driven architecture, parallel processing.

• Sub-second latency systems experience.

• Strong opinions on architecture with defensible push-back ability.

• Bias for ownership in messy, high-velocity environments.

• SF-based or willing to relocate immediately.

• 5 days/week in-person.

• Cracked with AI tooling.

• Genuine interest in mortgage / lending space.

Required Candidate QA

1. Are you SF-based or willing to relocate immediately, and comfortable being in-person 5 days/week?

2. What's your US work authorization status?

Green Flags

• AWS distributed systems / low-latency engineer.

• Palantir Foundry infrastructure.

• Verkada alumni direct culture and technical match.

• Anthropic / OpenAI Production Infra / Together AI / Fireworks / Modal.

• Deepgram / Cartesia / ElevenLabs infra / Retell / Vapi direct voice AI infra.

• HFT / quant infra (Two Sigma / Citadel / Jane Street / HRT / Jump).

• Ex-YC founding engineer with backend depth.

• Kubecon / AWS re talks, OSS distributed systems contributions.

• Prior compliance-heavy production systems (FDCPA / RESPA / TILA / HIPAA / SOC 2).

• Rebuilt production infra in prior role documented rebuild story.

Red Flags

• Under 3 years without AWS distributed-systems exception.

• Pure ML researcher.

• Product engineer in disguise as backend.

• Passive / non-opinionated engineer.

• Consultant (TCS / Accenture / Infosys / Wipro / Cognizant).

• Oracle, Workday background.

• FAANG career-tracker without zero-to-one signal.

• Mission-misaligned lending / mortgage bores them.

• AI-resistant.

• Overly senior (10+ years) with cadence incompatibility.

Ideal Companies

• Verkada

• AWS

• CockroachDB

• MongoDB

• Pinecone

• Cartesia

• Vapi

• Vercel

• Ironclad

Benefits Perks

• 401(k) Match

• Lunch And Dinner Covered

• Standard Medical / Dental / Vision

• Relocation Support