Description:
Target Profile:Our client wants a high-caliber full-stack/product engineer who also understands LLMs and agents.
The key distinction from their Research Engineer search:
FULL-STACK ENGINEERING FIRST AGENT DEPTH SECONDCandidates do not need to be hardcore agent researchers. The client explicitly allows engineers with hands-on LLM/agent experience or demonstrable ability to ramp quickly.
Core profile:FULL-STACK END-TO-END OWNERSHIP AGENTS/LLMs CUSTOMER-FACING 01 HIGH AGENCYWhat Theyll Actually Build:This role owns the product that helps engineers understand
why production agents are failing and whether fixes actually work.Ideal Candidate:Someone who can:
TALK TO CUSTOMER IDENTIFY PROBLEM DESIGN PRODUCT BUILD BACKEND BUILD UI SHIP OBSERVE ITERATEThey shouldnt need:
CUSTOMER PM PRD ENGINEERThey should be comfortable collapsing that chain themselves.
RequirementsMust Haves:- 3-7 years full-stack engineering
- Strong production engineering
- Owns systems data layer backend UI
- Hands-on LLM/agent experience or compelling evidence of ability to ramp rapidly
- Strong technical problem solving
- Comfortable with ambiguity
- Excellent communication
- Direct customer interaction
- Product instincts
- High agency
- Can define what to build rather than waiting for specs
- SF / willing to relocate
- 5 days/week in office
About 30% of the role is customer-facing, which is unusually important for this search.Strong Green Flags:- Palantir
- Databricks
- Datadog
- Cognition
- Decagon
- Sierra
- Linear
- Cursor
- Ramp
- Figma
- Vercel
- CockroachDB
- Retool
- Modal
- Anyscale
- Runway
- Applied Intuition
- Anduril
- Notion
- Nomic
- MotherDuck
- Strong product company + technical depth
- FDE / Solutions Engineer with serious coding depth
- Early startup engineer
- Ex-founder
- Founder-to-be profile
- Coding competitions
- Research + production engineering
- AI evals
- Observability
- Agent behavior monitoring
Nice-to-Haves:- Agent evals
- Observability
- Agent behavior monitoring
- FDE experience
- Solutions engineering
- Founder background
- Early startup
- Strong infrastructure
- Backend depth
- AI product experience
- Coding competitions
- Research experience
Red Flags:- Agent experience but mediocre engineering
- AI wrapper/demo experience
- Research without production ownership
- Pure backend/infrastructure without product range
- Pure frontend without systems depth
- Never owned data UI
- No customer-facing experience
- Needs specifications handed down
- Weak communicator
- Treats FDE/product engineering as a fallback
- Slow-moving candidate / weak commitment
- Cannot work in SF
BenefitsCompensation: $200K-$300K + equity
