Chief Engineer (Staff) - Full Time

The organization is an AI platform for financial services, powering conversational and agent-driven experiences for a broad set of banks and credit unions and reaching a large consumer base. We are a revenue-generating, cash-flow-positive, growth-stage company building AI-first contact centers and AI-native consumer banking experiences. The Chief Engineer is a deeply hands-on senior technical leader who owns an entire domain end-to-end, sets the technical bar by example, runs a pod, and partners with a domain product manager to deliver measurable impact — shaping where banking goes next.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture, design, and implementation for a major domain end-to-end; write production code and ship features yourself.
• Run a pod directly and hold a weekly council seat with senior leadership and other leaders.
• Set and maintain the technical bar: code reviews, shipping standards, reliability and performance practices.
• Hire, mentor, and steer engineers and tech leads in your domain without becoming a pure manager; unblock execution and grow technical capability.
• Partner as an equal with the domain product manager to define outcomes and measure impact beyond implementation details.
• Embed AI-native workflows and frontier models into day-to-day engineering (tooling, copilot-style workflows, model evaluation).
• Own production systems, reliability, observability, and incident response for your domain.
• Drive integrations, agent behavior, data and retrieval systems, and operational backbones as applicable to your domain.

Qualifications

• Senior-most individual contributor (Staff-level) or hands-on technical founder with ongoing, demonstrable engineering practice.
• Proven end-to-end ownership of a critical domain or system at scale, or equivalent experience at a high-velocity startup.
• Deep technical credibility: you lead through the work, make major technical decisions, and can explain trade-offs you made and rejected.
• Actively writing and reviewing code today; not a distant “architect.”
• Strong AI fluency: daily use of frontier models and AI development tools; AI is integrated into your workflow.
• Strong systems and reliability instincts with real production ownership (observability, SLAs, incident handling).
• First-principles problem-solving, high learning velocity, and comfort with ambiguity and fast-paced environments.
• BS/BA in Computer Science required; MS/PhD strongly preferred.
• California-based and committed to working onsite; H-1B transfers considered.
• Preferred/bonus: production experience with conversational/voice/agent-like systems, fintech or regulated financial services experience, 0→1 platform building, published talks or open-source contributions in AI systems or platform engineering.