Staff Engineer, Engineering-wide

This senior IC role has no fixed team. You would rotate across Plaud's product, platform and infrastructure teams, joining whichever team has the hardest problem: a migration, an on-call mess, a cross-team API or an AI quality gap. You fix it with them and leave the patterns behind. The stack runs from devices and mobile to Go/Python services and LLM pipelines, and you'd report to the head of engineering. What you will do • Rotate across Plaud's product, platform and infrastructure teams based on business needs, working with whichever team has the highest-leverage engineering problem. • Go deep with each team on its hardest problem, such as a stalled migration, a reliability or on-call problem, a slow CI pipeline, or an AI quality gap, and ship the fix together. • Write production code: design, build, review and ship, not just advise. • Lead technical designs that cross team boundaries, including shared APIs, data contracts between teams, and handoffs between product and platform teams. • Raise the engineering bar in every team you join: testing, observability, runbooks, code review, and evals in CI/CD. • Build an end-to-end understanding of the whole system, from the device and capture pipeline to transcription, AI notes, AI agent features and the services underneath. Use it to guide architecture decisions across the org with Gene and the eng leads. • Mentor senior engineers in the US and Asia, and help grow the next generation of tech leads. • Explore and drive AI-native engineering practice, showing teams how AI-assisted development speeds up real work. Skills, qualifications and experience we look for • 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years at Staff level or equivalent scope. • Deep expertise in more than one area, such as backend distributed systems, mobile or client, data pipelines, or ML/LLM systems, and the ability to ramp up quickly on unfamiliar code. • Proven track record leading technical work across teams, with design docs and migrations that other engineers adopted. • Strong in Go or Python, plus at least one client stack (iOS, Android, React or Electron), with cloud-native experience (AWS/GCP, Kubernetes). • Experience shipping LLM features in production, including retrieval, prompt pipelines, evals, and managing latency and cost. • Excellent written communication and comfort working across time zones and cultures. • Low ego and high ownership: happy to make the team look good and move on. • Recognized technical influence through open-source contributions, highly starred GitHub repositories, conference talks or technical publications is a plus. • Routinely uses AI tools in daily work and can demo usage from the last two weeks during the interview. What we offer 1. Meaningful Ownership An Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) that gives a real stake in Plaud's long-term success. 2. High-Impact Environment Work in a fast-moving, product-driven environment where your ideas directly shape the future of AI productivity. 3. Cutting-Edge AI Tools for Productivity Access to best-in-class AI tools, including Gemini, Claude Code, and other frontier AI systems to maximize engineering and execution efficiency. 4. Best-in-Class Equipment Choice of top-spec laptops, high-performance workstation setups, and cutting-edge Plaud devices for all new hires. 5. Team & Culture Annual company offsites, team events, and a culture that values craftsmanship, ownership, and velocity.