Senior Software Engineer

Overview

Senior Software Engineer (Startup)

About The Role

We’re a fast-moving, top tier VC funded Silicon Valley startup, building ambitious products at the intersection of web apps and modern AI systems. That means we’re looking for people who thrive in ambiguity, move quickly, and love building zero-to-one products. We ship fast, cut clean corners, and obsess over reliability, security and craft. You’ll work end-to-end—from whiteboard to prod—owning services, shaping architecture, and raising the bar for engineering excellence.

You’ll fit right in if you’ve worked in an early-stage company before — or if you’ve always wanted to experience the intensity and freedom of a startup. We value initiative over process, learning over perfection, and collaboration over hierarchy.

Things change daily, and that’s part of the fun you’ll wear multiple hats, experiment, and help shape both the product and the culture from the very beginning.

What you`ll do

• Design & build production services and UIs, from APIs to frontends, with an eye for simplicity, performance, and operability.
• Own systems instrument, monitor, and debug in prod; drive incident response and post-mortems; automate everything.
• Evolve our AI stack prototype and productionize features that depend on LLMs—prompt pipelines, evals, guardrails, retrieval, and memory.
• Tune & measure experiment with model selection,finetuning, quantization, LoRA,PEFT, structured outputs, function,tool calling, and latency,cost tradeoffs.
• Ship great APIs design pragmatic REST, GraphQL, and,or gRPC interfaces; versioning, pagination, authN,Z, schema evolution, and backward compatibility.
• Collaborate tightly with product,design to turn ambiguous problems into lovable, secure, and compliant experiences.
• Mentor teammates via reviews, tech talks, and crisp docs.
  
  

• Curiosity as a habit you read release notes, try new runtimes and models, and build weekend prototypes for fun, a lot of your Youtube consumption is hacking and learning new technologies, and you enjoy learning what you don’t know on your own
• Self-driven you find the problem behind the problem, align stakeholders, and land outcomes without hand-holding.
• Systems mindset you think in SLOs, budgets (latency,cost,error), blast radius, and graceful degradation.
• API ergonomics you care about naming, error design, rate limits, observability, generated SDKs, and docs that don’t lie.
• Data foundations you know when to pick Postgres vs columnar vs KV vs vector; you`ve shipped schema migrations and zero-downtime deploys.
• LLM-practical you`ve built RAG or agents in anger; you understand context windows, tokenization, evals, and prompt,tooling hygiene.
• Security instincts you default to least privilege, tame secrets, and design auth flows that survive real traffic.
  
  

• Hands-on with vector DBs (e.g., FAISS, HNSW, Milvus, PGVector), embeddings pipelines, and hybrid ranking.
• Can Design retrieval layers build embeddings pipelines, vector indexes, hybrid search (BM25 + ANN), chunking,merging strategies, and memory graphs.
• Protocol-fluent you actually enjoy HTTP,1.1 vs HTTP,2,3 quirks, caching semantics, content negotiation, and idempotency.
• Experience with model hosting (self-hosted inference servers, serverless GPUs, or managed endpoints) and caching,streaming strategies.
• Infra chops containers, IaC, CI,CD, service meshes, feature flags, canary,blue-green, cost observability.
• Frontend XP with modern TypeScript frameworks and component systems; accessibility and performance budgets.
• Prior startup experience or meaningful open-source contributions.
  
  

• Bias to action short feedback loops, measured experiments, reversible decisions.
• Quality without ceremony tests, tracing, and dashboards are table stakes.
• Written culture design docs, runbooks, and decision logs that future-you will thank you for.
• Flexible, ownership-heavy take on scope that excites (and scares) you a little.
  
  

• You`ve shipped a user-visible feature end-to-end and made it boringly reliable.
• You`ve hardened an API (or three) clear contracts, observability, and error budgets in place.
• You`ve improved our AI retrieval,memory layer with measurable gains in quality or cost.
• You`ve leveled up teammates via patterns, docs, or tooling that sticks.
  
  

Competitive salary + equity; Development team based in Chennai, collaborating with some team members in San Francisco.

About Us

We are backed by a top-tier Silicon Valley venture capital firm and led by two seasoned Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and executives who have scaled startups from inception to IPO, led successful exits to Fortune 500 companies, and tripled the valuation of publicly traded firms in record time.

If this sounds like you, show us, don’t just tell us share a system you`ve built, the toughest incident you`ve owned, or a small repo that captures your taste, and,or the last two-three things you built and taught yourself.

Find our real company name and send us your accomplishments along with your best guess on the application tech stack we used for the website (and why you think so) to at personai.me.