Strategic Software Engineer (Full Stack)

Strategic Software Engineer (Full-Stack) – AI Platform | 2–5 YOE | Ex-Founders Preferred

Location: In-person (Palo Alto, CA)

Type: Full-time | High equity + salary | Ground-floor role

You’ll also be working directly with Kumar Srivastava, CTO and ML lead to execute the platform including backend, APIs, LLM workflows, and user-facing interfaces. Kumar has built AI & ML powered enterprise & consumer software for 20+ years. You will be on the fast track to learn how to design, build, scale and operate enterprise-class AI systems. This will be a hands-on experience that you cannot get from watching youtube videos, reading blogs or following industry experts.

50,000 food and beverage products you consume are harmful. We’re here to fix that by enabling CPGs to develop better, healthier and better options using our AI platform - world’s first.

You’ll be a critical force in shaping our platform. You will be a key factor in defining how it leverages defensible and purpose-built AI for the CPG industry (Next release of GPT won’t kill us!). You will be exposed to the best-in-class AI algorithms and techniques including LLMs, AI agents and proprietary ML.

We have a high-agency culture:

• Weekly Customer Value: Every week we ship something that customers can see and use
• Direct Customer Interaction: Engineers talk directly to customers, no translation layers
• Fast Decision Making: We debate Monday, decide immediately, execute Tuesday-Friday
• Results Over Process: We care about customer impact, not perfect engineering practices

We should talk if you’re:

• You have a genuine curiosity about agentic product experiences and are excited about understanding the impact of AI on engineering users.
• You’re a previous founder or founding engineer. You have built something from scratch that people use or pay for.
• You’re unusually obsessed with hard problems. Your current skills or even what you've done before is less important than your ability to go all-in and accomplish anything that you set your mind to.
• You’re comfortable with ambiguity and adapting to dynamic priorities. You need to have good judgement to know when to let little fires burn and when to immediately jump in.
• You have excellent communication and candor. You’ll be communicating directly with customers, users, engineers and collaborating with us on key decisions.
• You are not a pay-me-to perform type person. You’re self-motivated to solve bigger problems in the world. If that's not an exciting mission for you, it will be hard to stay motivated through the inevitable highs and lows.
• You have grit and perseverance. You should be accustomed to picking between hard options and pushing through it.

Let’s not talk if:

• You’re not based in The Bay Area (we’ll be a team of three if you join so we’ll be sitting next to each other in Bay Area)
• You’re not willing to work six days per week (we take Sundays off)
• You’re not excited about using codegen tools like Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, etc.
• You’re not comfortable deleting 80%-90% of the code that you write.
• You’re not comfortable with ambiguity and rapid context-switching.
• You don’t like candor- receiving and giving direct, honest feedback.
• You need a well defined structure or career ladder.

What You’ll Do

• Own end-to-end development of AI-powered product features across backend, frontend, and deployment layers
• Integrate LLMs, internal embeddings, and structured data models into usable product experiences
• Translate ambiguous customer needs into clear UX + code
• Help the CTO ideate, plan, deliver high quality software to consistently exceed customer expectations
• Support in defining engineering culture, standards, and roadmap with the CTO
• Collaborate tightly with our ML team to make outputs trustworthy, not just accurate

Must-Haves

• Have 2–5 years of full-stack or backend-heavy engineering experience
• Have LLM and/or ML integration experience (e.g., LangChain, vector DBs, prompt design, model outputs into product)
• Have shipped real products — ideally in vertical SaaS, internal tools, ML/analytics platforms, or enterprise software
• Can code, but also think in product — UX, value, users
• Have founder experience or took extreme ownership in a startup environment
• Want to work in-person with a small team to move fast and win together

Bonus Points For

• Working on ML infra or AI developer tooling
• Scientific computing, optimization, or data-heavy systems
• Clean design/UX taste — our users are scientists, not technologists
• Familiarity with SOC2, enterprise security, or healthcare/regulated industries