Senior / Staff Product Engineer

Senior / Staff Product Engineer

Full time

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San Francisco, CA | Hybrid

3 - 6 Years of Experience

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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.

Senior / Staff Product Engineer

Location

San Francisco, CA

Hybrid role requiring four days per week in the office in downtown San Francisco.

Compensation

$200,000 – $270,000 Base + Competitive Equity

Visa

Open to visa transfers, including H-1B and OPT. Full sponsorship may be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Company Stage

Series B / High-Growth Technology Company

Industry

FinTech, RegTech, AI, Financial Services, Compliance, Enterprise SaaS, B2B, AI Agents

About the Company

Our client is building AI-powered compliance technology that helps financial institutions automate complex financial crime workflows.

The platform uses AI agents and workflow automation to process large volumes of compliance cases for banks and fintech companies, helping compliance teams automate AML, sanctions, KYC, and other regulatory review processes while keeping humans in the loop.

The company is experiencing rapid growth and is scaling its engineering organization while continuing to build deeply customer-facing products.

The engineering team operates with a strong product mindset, with engineers expected to work directly with customers, understand complex business problems, and translate those problems into reliable technical solutions.

This is a high-ownership Product Engineering role where you'll own substantial features from customer discovery through production deployment and iteration.

As a Senior or Staff Product Engineer, you'll work across the full stack, building backend services, APIs, databases, frontend experiences, and AI-powered workflows using TypeScript, Python, Node.js, and React.

The ideal candidate combines strong full-stack engineering fundamentals with startup experience, customer empathy, product thinking, and a demonstrated ability to build zero-to-one products used by real customers.

What You'll Do

• Own substantial product features end-to-end from discovery through production deployment and iteration

• Work directly with customers to understand complex compliance and operational problems

• Lead customer discovery and requirements-gathering conversations

• Translate customer needs into scalable and elegant technical solutions

• Build zero-to-one products and features used by real customers

• Develop AI-powered workflows that automate complex compliance processes

• Build agentic workflows that coordinate AI tools and data services

• Develop systems supporting AML, sanctions, and KYC review workflows

• Build intuitive interfaces for compliance case management

• Develop reporting and analytics experiences for enterprise customers

• Build workflow configuration and automation interfaces

• Develop production-grade backend services using TypeScript, Node.js, and Python

• Build and maintain production APIs

• Design and work with relational databases and data models

• Build full-stack product experiences using React and Next.js

• Integrate AI and LLM capabilities into customer-facing product workflows

• Build reliable production systems that process high volumes of compliance cases

• Design technical solutions that balance speed, reliability, scalability, and correctness

• Make architecture decisions independently

• Own technical projects from initial concept through deployment

• Ship production code quickly and iterate based on customer feedback

• Collaborate closely with Product, Design, Engineering, and business stakeholders

• Work with enterprise customers to continuously improve product experiences

• Translate complex regulated-industry requirements into simple user experiences

• Contribute to technical architecture and engineering standards

• Improve system reliability, maintainability, and performance

• Help establish engineering patterns and best practices as the team scales

• Operate effectively in a fast-paced startup environment

• Take ownership of ambiguous problems without requiring extensive direction

• Help shape the technical direction of customer-facing AI products

• Contribute to workflow orchestration and AI agent infrastructure

• Work with cloud infrastructure and production deployment systems

• Balance technical quality with the urgency of customer-driven product development

• Build products that directly impact customer workflows and business outcomes

• Ideal Candidate Background

• Experience Requirements

• 3–6+ years of product software engineering experience

• Strong full-stack software engineering background

• Strong backend engineering experience

• Strong experience with Python or TypeScript/Node.js

• Experience building and shipping zero-to-one products

• Experience building products used by real customers

• Experience at a high-growth, talent-dense startup

• Experience owning projects end-to-end

• Experience working closely with customers or customer-facing teams

• Experience translating customer problems into technical solutions

• Experience building APIs and working with databases

• Experience working across frontend and backend systems

• Experience with modern product engineering environments

• Strong product thinking and customer empathy

• Strong technical judgment

• Comfortable operating independently with limited support

• Experience working in ambiguous and rapidly changing environments

• Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills

• Demonstrated ability to ship quickly while maintaining engineering quality

• Experience working closely with Product and Design

• Strong ownership mentality

• Ability to balance technical and business considerations

• Experience working at startups rather than exclusively large technology companies

• Technical Requirements

• Strong Python or TypeScript/Node.js experience

• Strong backend development fundamentals

• Strong full-stack engineering capabilities

• Experience building production APIs

• Strong database fundamentals

• Experience with PostgreSQL or similar relational databases

• Experience with React

• Experience with Next.js preferred

• Experience building production web applications

• Strong understanding of modern web architecture

• Experience designing backend services and APIs

• Experience integrating third-party services and APIs

• Experience with cloud infrastructure

• Experience deploying production applications

• Experience building reliable production systems

• Experience with workflow orchestration preferred

• Experience integrating LLMs or AI features into production applications preferred

• Experience with AI agents or agentic workflows preferred

• Strong understanding of software architecture

• Strong system design fundamentals

• Ability to make technical tradeoffs independently

• Strong debugging and problem-solving skills

• Ability to write clean, maintainable, production-quality code

• Experience working with data-driven applications

• Experience building customer-facing product experiences

• Ability to move between frontend and backend development as needed

• Comfortable working across the full product engineering lifecycle

• Familiarity with regulated or high-correctness environments preferred

Education

• Bachelor's degree preferred

• Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or related technical disciplines preferred

• Strong educational pedigree is a plus

• Exceptional engineering experience and demonstrated product impact can compensate for academic pedigree

• Soft Skills

• Strong product thinking

• Strong customer empathy

• High ownership mentality

• High agency

• Comfortable operating independently

• Strong problem-solving ability

• Comfortable with ambiguity

• Bias toward action

• Strong communication skills

• Strong customer-facing communication ability

• Ability to understand complex business problems

• Ability to translate customer needs into technical solutions

• Strong business judgment

• Strong technical judgment

• Collaborative and low-ego working style

• Strong cross-functional instincts

• Comfortable working directly with customers

• Strong execution ability

• Ability to move quickly without sacrificing quality

• Comfortable making decisions with incomplete information

• Strong learning mentality

• Adaptable to rapidly changing requirements

• Comfortable in a fast-paced startup environment

• Motivated by building products from zero to one

• Excited by meaningful customer impact

• Comfortable working across the product and engineering stack

• Strong attention to detail

• Strong accountability

• Comfortable taking ownership without extensive support

• Able to balance engineering quality with business urgency

• Genuine interest in AI and financial technology