Senior Member of Technical Staff

ABOUT THE ROLE Join a small engineering team building AI systems for hospitality operations. You will own full-stack components that help AI agents understand guest requests, find reliable information, use tools, and resolve issues or escalate them when needed. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Build response-generation pipelines for intent classification, context assembly, tool selection, and escalation decisions. - Develop retrieval systems that ground responses in accurate, current customer information. - Create reliable multi-step tool workflows and handle third-party API failures. - Build evaluation frameworks using real conversations to measure quality and catch regressions. - Implement observability and tracing that help support teams understand system behavior. - Develop interfaces that let non-technical users adjust agent behavior. - Extend agent capabilities to voice, including real-time transcription and tool use. - Improve speed and cost through model routing, caching, and prompt refinement, while contributing to infrastructure, data pipelines, integrations, and APIs. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - At least 5 years of professional software engineering experience, including 3 or more years building production systems used by real people. - Substantive startup or founder experience shipping real products. - Experience designing and debugging production AI systems, especially retrieval pipelines, prompt engineering, and model orchestration. - Strong retrieval experience, such as knowledge bases, ranking, context validation, or semantic search, plus methods for evaluating production systems. - Experience with multi-step workflows, tool orchestration or function calling, and observability or debugging for complex pipelines. - Proficiency in a backend language such as Python, Go, Rust, or Java, and the ability to work across multiple layers of the stack. - Experience integrating third-party APIs and managing production failure modes; experience with real-time systems, voice, user-facing controls, or model cost and latency optimization is valuable. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS Base salary is $130,000 to $220,000 annually, with equity of 0.20% to 1.20%. Benefits include health insurance and a 401(k) match. Visa sponsorship is not available. LOCATION On-site in San Francisco, California.