Staff Software Engineer
About this role
As a Staff Software Engineer at Idler, you'll shape the technical direction of core systems that enable our products to scale, perform, and stay reliable. You will work closely with product and engineering leaders to tackle complex architecture and operational challenges and mentor other engineers to raise the team’s technical bar.
What you'll do
- Lead the architecture and design of scalable, high‑impact systems and services.
- Implement and ship production-quality code that balances performance, observability, and maintainability.
- Drive system reliability and performance improvements through monitoring, incident response, and remediation.
- Mentor and coach engineers across the organization to improve engineering practices and technical growth.
- Collaborate with product, design, and cross-functional teams to translate product needs into technical solutions.
- Establish and promote best practices for testing, code review, and deployment workflows.
- Influence technical roadmap and make trade-offs that align with business and operational goals.
What Idler is looking for
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with several years in senior or lead technical roles.
- Proven experience designing and operating distributed systems, microservices, or backend platforms at scale.
- Strong fundamentals in computer science, including algorithms, data structures, and system design.
- Production experience with cloud-based architectures and tooling (e.g., AWS/GCP/Azure, containers, orchestration).
- Proficiency in one or more modern programming languages and familiarity with APIs, databases, and observability tools.
- Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers, lead technical discussions, and influence cross-functional stakeholders.
Company at a glance
Idler builds reinforcement learning coding environments that train AI to code like elite engineers using real-world scenarios. It closed a multimillion-dollar contract with a leading foundation lab and is scaling to power the training data layer for frontier AI; SF-based.
What happens next
Skip the application pile. I get you in front of the people who decide.
Confirm the fit
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
I pitch you to the company
I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.
A meeting lands on your calendar
When the company wants to meet, I get the call on your calendar. You just show up.
Culture & values
We are a tight-knit founding team in San Francisco.
We move quickly.
We think deeply about what makes good training data.
We play to win.
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