Chief Engineer (Principal Engineer)

Chief Engineer (Principal Engineer)

Full time

San Francisco, CA | Onsite

8 - 15 Years of Experience

Share this job

Who is Recruiting from Scratch:

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.

Chief Engineer (Principal Engineer)

Location: San Francisco, CA Work Arrangement: On-site, 5 days per week Employment Type: Full-time Experience: 10+ years; ideally 8–15 years Base Salary: $335,000–$375,000 Equity: Competitive, founding-team-tier equity Visa Sponsorship: Open to visa transfers and sponsorships, including H-1B and TN

Company Description

We’re working with a profitable, venture-backed AI company building agentic AI solutions for the financial services industry.

The company develops AI-powered systems that help financial institutions modernize customer experiences and automate complex workflows across voice, digital, and employee-assisted channels. Its platform combines conversational AI, large language models, and autonomous agents to deliver intelligent, scalable solutions in a highly regulated environment.

With significant customer adoption and strong market demand, the company is entering an important stage of growth, expanding its engineering capabilities and building new products that will shape the future of AI-powered financial services.

You'll join as one of the most senior technical leaders in the organization, owning a critical engineering domain from architecture through execution. This is a highly hands-on role for someone who has built complex production systems, taken ambiguous initiatives from zero to one, and can set the technical standard for an entire engineering organization.

You’ll work closely with the founders and product leadership, with significant autonomy, company-level influence, and the opportunity to shape major technical initiatives.

What You Will Do

Technical Architecture & End-to-End Ownership

• Own a core engineering domain end to end, including its architecture, technical direction, engineering standards, and measurable outcomes.
• Take ownership of complex and ambiguous technical initiatives, driving them from initial concept through production deployment and scale.
• Architect and build production systems that support critical business and product capabilities.
• Make high-impact technical decisions and establish the engineering standards that other teams follow.
• Identify architectural bottlenecks, improve system reliability, and drive technical improvements across your domain.
• Take responsibility for company-critical systems that other engineers and product teams depend on.

Hands-on Engineering & Technical Leadership

• Remain deeply hands-on, writing, reviewing, and shipping production code alongside the engineering team.
• Lead through technical contribution rather than relying on management structures or delegation alone.
• Guide and unblock engineers and technical leads across your domain.
• Review architecture, code, and technical decisions while maintaining a high bar for quality and velocity.
• Mentor engineers and strengthen the technical capabilities of the wider organization.
• Partner with engineering and product leadership to prioritize initiatives and deliver meaningful business outcomes.

AI Systems & Agentic Engineering

• Build and evolve AI-powered systems using frontier models, agentic architectures, and modern AI development tools.
• Help establish an AI-native engineering culture across your domain.
• Use and standardize tools such as Claude Code and Cursor to improve engineering productivity and development workflows.
• Contribute to the architecture of AI runtimes, agentic systems, conversational AI, and other advanced AI capabilities.
• Make thoughtful decisions around LLM integration, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluation, reliability, and production performance.
• Explore new technical approaches and help translate advances in AI into reliable, scalable products.

Product & Organizational Influence

• Hold a regular technical leadership position alongside the founders and contribute to company-level engineering decisions.
• Partner closely with the Domain Product Manager to define priorities and drive measurable product and business outcomes.
• Help shape the long-term technical roadmap across major product and infrastructure initiatives.
• Lead technical execution across multiple engineering pods within your domain.
• Influence how the engineering organization approaches architecture, AI development, technical quality, and delivery.
• Help build the next generation of AI-powered financial services products.

Ideal Candidate Background

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, ideally within the 8–15-year range.
• Experience operating at Principal, Distinguished Engineer, Staff+ or hands-on technical founder level.
• Strong track record building and owning complex production systems at meaningful scale.
• Has taken a technically challenging or ambiguous initiative from zero to one.
• Has owned a company-critical system or technical domain that other teams and products depend on.
• Deep technical credibility in AI, LLMs, agentic systems, or other advanced AI technologies.
• Extremely AI-fluent, with daily hands-on use of frontier development tools such as Claude Code and Cursor.
• Strong system design, architecture, and software engineering fundamentals.
• Comfortable writing, reviewing, and shipping production code while providing technical direction to other engineers.
• Experience guiding engineers and technical leads without moving into a purely managerial role.
• Strong judgment and ability to operate independently in high-ambiguity environments.
• Experience working in a startup or high-growth technology company.
• Based in or willing to relocate to San Francisco and comfortable working on-site five days per week.

Technical Skills

Core Software Engineering

• System design and architecture.
• Production-grade software engineering.
• Distributed and scalable systems.
• End-to-end technical ownership.
• Performance, reliability, and engineering quality.
• Technical leadership across engineering teams.

AI & Agentic Systems

• Agentic AI.
• Conversational AI.
• Voice AI.
• Large Language Models (LLMs).
• AI runtimes and agent orchestration.
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
• AI evaluation systems.
• Production AI system architecture.

AI-Native Development

• Claude Code.
• Cursor.
• Frontier AI development tools.
• AI-assisted engineering workflows.
• Agent-driven development practices.
• AI-native engineering productivity.

Data & Platform Systems

• Data platforms.
• Integrations and enterprise systems.
• AI infrastructure.
• Scalable production platforms.
• Systems supporting real-time AI applications.

Preferred Background

• Experience building conversational AI, voice AI, or agentic AI systems.
• Experience developing production LLM applications or AI runtimes.
• Experience with RAG architectures, AI evaluation systems, and agent orchestration.
• Fintech or financial services experience.
• Experience building technology for regulated industries.
• Experience working with banking, credit unions, or other financial institutions.
• Founding engineer or early technical leader at a high-growth startup.
• Experience leading a major product or infrastructure initiative from zero to one.
• Experience establishing technical standards across multiple engineering teams.
• Experience working closely with founders and senior product leadership.

Leadership & Working Style

• Technical leadership through code: Leads by building, architecting, reviewing, and setting the technical bar.
• Exceptional ownership: Comfortable taking responsibility for critical systems and high-impact technical decisions.
• High technical judgment: Can navigate ambiguous problems and make sound architectural decisions.
• AI-native mindset: Actively uses frontier AI tools and understands how to apply them effectively in production engineering.
• Strong execution: Can move from an ambiguous problem to a reliable production solution.
• Organizational influence: Able to raise the technical capabilities of engineers and technical leads across teams.
• Product orientation: Understands how technical decisions connect to product priorities and business outcomes.
• Autonomy: Comfortable operating at the highest level of technical responsibility in a fast-moving organization.

Compensation & Benefits

• Base Salary: $335,000–$375,000.
• Equity: Competitive, founding-team-tier equity.
• Work Arrangement: On-site, five days per week.
• Location: San Francisco, CA.