Staff Engineer

Location
San Francisco
Workplace
On-site
Employment
Full-time
Compensation
$250k – $320k + equity
Visa
Visa Sponsorship Available

About this role

What we're looking for?

We need a generalist software engineer with at least 3 years of experience (4+ preferred) and a CS degree from a strong program who has built high-performance, real-time backend or full-stack systems. You should be comfortable owning design and architecture across the entire product in a small, fast-moving, in-office team, and have a track record of shipping reliable production systems end to end. Bonus points if you started at a top company like Meta or Google and then moved to a startup or mid-size company, or if you have startup or founder experience or have built production AI/ML systems.

What you'll do

  • Architect and own core systems that power real-time AI voice and compliance workflows for major banks and mortgage lenders
  • Take ownership of performance and reliability, pushing toward sub-700ms latency with event-driven architecture and parallel processing
  • Work closely with a 7-person engineering team and the founders across infrastructure, backend, and AI reliability, with no siloed teams
  • Deploy, operate, and scale resilient distributed systems on Kubernetes
  • Lead features from whiteboard design to live production in bank environments, often shipping within days
  • Build and refine a self-improving AI system that gets better with every customer interaction and human feedback signal

Notes for sourcing: The role is language-agnostic, though the team works primarily in Python. Candidates who have only done frontend work are not a fit. A master's degree is not required. Candidates must be familiar with AI and LLMs, but prior agent-building experience is not required. Candidates whose experience is only at large companies are generally not preferred.

What happens next

Skip the application pile. Clera gets 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.

Clera pitches you to the company

Clera writes the intro, sends it to the founder, and handles the back-and-forth.

A meeting lands on your calendar

When the company wants to meet, Clera gets the call on your calendar. You just show up.

Culture & values

Engineers work across the whole product with no fixed sub-teams or silos

Everyone on the team has a real say in design and architecture

Engineers take work from the whiteboard all the way to production

Team works in person, five days a week, at the downtown San Francisco office near Salesforce Tower

Culture is trust-based, allowing flexibility to step out for personal time and work out

Engineers work closely with founding engineers and customer-facing deployment team

Deployment team is turning into a group of forward deployed product managers who each own and grow customer accounts

Team describes current growth stage as exciting and also a little terrifying

Ask your AI about this role

Connect Clera once, then ask if it fits you.

Ask about this role

Tell me about the Staff Engineer role at Kastle on Clera (https://www.getclera.com/jobs/kastle/staff-engineer--j4oh4vb1772s). Does it fit my profile and preferences? If it does, tell Clera I'm interested.
Not connected yet? Takes a minute
One click above pre-fills the connector. Or by hand: Settings > Connectors > Add custom connector, paste https://mcp.getclera.com. Either way, sign in with the account you use on Clera and approve the consent screen.
https://mcp.getclera.com

Sign in with your Clera account. MCP docs