Senior/Staff Software Engineer - Tech Lead

In this role, you will provide hands-on technical leadership for the development of innovative open-source infrastructure supporting federated AI and privacy-preserving technologies. You will lead the engineering direction of a specialized squad building tools and benchmarking infrastructure for AI model ensembles, helping establish more transparent, reproducible, and accessible AI performance evaluations. Combining software development, system architecture, and team mentorship, you will play a key role in transforming ambitious technical concepts into reliable, production-ready solutions. You will guide architectural decisions, strengthen engineering practices, and ensure the delivery of scalable, secure, and maintainable systems. Working closely with engineering and product leadership, you will help shape technical strategy while empowering a talented, globally distributed team. This is an opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to open-source innovation while taking ownership of complex distributed systems in a mission-driven, remote-first environment.

• At least 8 years of professional software engineering experience, with a proven track record of personally building, deploying, and operating production systems at meaningful scale.

• Hands-on experience developing production software using AI coding agents such as Claude Code or Cursor, along with the ability to guide teams in adopting and managing agent-assisted development workflows.

• Advanced proficiency in Python 3.12 or later, including experience with FastAPI services, asynchronous orchestration of concurrent model calls, typed SDK design and packaging, parsers, Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs), and Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) execution.

• Strong experience designing distributed systems and APIs, particularly interfaces that evolve and serve multiple independent teams or services.

• Demonstrated technical leadership experience, including introducing engineering quality practices such as code reviews, testing, and CI/CD processes.

• Previous experience mentoring or managing at least two engineers, with direct management responsibility not required.

• Strong architectural judgment and the ability to make sound technical decisions, prioritize effectively, and balance long-term scalability with immediate delivery needs.

• Comfortable working in ambiguous environments with limited resources, taking ownership of technical outcomes, and remaining accountable for production releases, system reliability, and incident resolution.

• Excellent written communication skills and strong asynchronous collaboration capabilities, with experience building trusted working relationships across geographically distributed teams and time zones.

• Proven ability to collaborate cross-functionally and communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both engineering and non-technical stakeholders.

• Practical experience with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and information retrieval, including vector databases, retrieval pipelines, embedding strategies, and aggregation techniques, would be a strong advantage.

• Familiarity with Vue 3, TypeScript, Rust, Tauri, or cross-platform desktop application development would be highly beneficial.

• Experience with networking and peer-to-peer (P2P) applications would be considered an additional asset.

• Ability to work as an independent contractor with substantial overlap with US Eastern business hours. Candidates should be located within approximately one hour of the Eastern Time Zone.