Staff Engineer
About the role
Senior IC engineer role to architect and scale Sauna by Wordware’s AI agent platform. Not a management position; partner to CTO on architectural decisions, with hands-on coding and system design responsibilities in a high-scale TypeScript stack.
Responsibilities
- Make hard architectural tradeoffs and own the outcome: Durable Object SQLite vs. shared Postgres for session state. Cloudflare Workers CPU limits vs. longer-running workloads. Single-tenant sandboxes vs. multi-tenant pools.
- Design the system that handles concurrent agent sessions across integrations (e.g., iMessage, Calendar, Slack, Linear) within one session with consistent state.
- Define reliability and observability standards for a ~20-person team: SLOs, error budgets, tracing strategy, incident response patterns.
- Review every significant PR and set technical direction without blocking velocity.
- Ship code daily and provide architectural leadership with tangible impact.
- Proactively identify and build additional necessary components or systems.
Qualifications
- 8+ years as an IC engineer. Staff or Principal at a scale-driven company.
- Experience building and operating systems that serve millions of users; understanding distributed state, real-time streaming, and multi-tenant isolation.
- Recent hands-on AI/LLM work; experience with agent systems, model routing, or tool-use architectures.
- Fluency in TypeScript; productive on day one since the entire stack is TS.
- Desire for real ownership and risk-taking beyond traditional architecture review meetings.
Skills
Benefits
- Base salary $280K–$400K plus significant equity
- Health, dental, 401(k)
- Generous PTO
- Gym budget, lunch
About Wordware
AI agents you can rely on
AI Agents have arrived. They are powerful enough to read, plan, and act across your everyday life and work. The question is no longer whether they can run canned demos to check the weather, it’s whether real teams can rely on them for critical work. We optimize for adoption over spectacle: useful, accountable systems that help top professional complete real tasks. Wordware is backed by Spark Capital, Felicis, and Y Combinator, with a $30M seed round. Our beautiful, historic San Francisco office sits in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge, it’s full of plants and radiates innovation and calm. We genuinely love working together. At lunch we talk about alignment and AI consciousness, we have surfboards in the office ready to use, we take walking meetings on the beach and hang out after work at the bar or climbing wall. We work really hard because we care deeply about what we do. Sauna is Wordware’s AI workspace for professionals. Think ‘Cursor for Knowledge Work’ and you’re halfway there. With explicit permission, it connects to tools like Gmail, Calendar, Slack, and thousands more, to gather the right context to move your work forward. It learns who you are, drafts and refines your documents, presentations, and datasets, researches across the web and your org’s internal knowledge, summarizes long threads to cut through the noise, proposes next steps, even acts on your behalf when enabled. You can work with Sauna live, side-by-side, or schedule jobs to run automatically in the background, with clear permissions and easy off-switches. Sauna brings the power of AI Agents to all professionals.
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