Staff Full Stack Engineer

Knit

$250K — $300K *
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-7 years of experience with LLM/agent systems and prompt tooling.
  • Strong background in event-driven systems and workflow engines.
  • Familiarity with observability tools like OpenTelemetry and Datadog.
  • Experience with enterprise security and compliance (SOC 2, GDPR).
  • Ability to create short specs and manage small pull requests for daily deployment.

Responsibilities

  • Own features from design through to scalable service deployment.
  • Architect the core agent orchestration engine for complex LLM workflows.
  • Build user-friendly, AI-integrated interfaces with React/Next.js.
  • Develop an experimentation platform for AI agents and prompts.
  • Ensure fast, reliable shipping of features including robust testing and monitoring.
  • Collaborate with cross-functional teams to turn ambiguous ideas into products.
  • Optimize system performance focusing on latency and infrastructure efficiency.

Benefits

  • Competitive salary plus commission plan where applicable.
  • Equity options in the company.
  • Comprehensive healthcare coverage (medical, dental, vision).
  • 401(k) plan with company matching.
  • Flexible time-off policy and hybrid working options.
Full Job Description
Overview

We're continuing to build out our NYC engineering team and are looking for exceptional builders who are resourceful, deeply technical, and thrive in high-ownership environments.

As an early member of the team, you'll play a key role in shaping the core of our platform and contributing to a team that will scale to 20+ engineers over the next 18 months. You'll build and orchestrate AI agents, explore new UX paradigms, and work on some of the hardest problems in applied AI with meaningful ownership across the stack.
Responsibilities | What you will own...

Primary responsibilities of this role:
  • Own 0→1 and 1→N features across the stack, from design docs to building high-throughput data pipelines and scalable FastAPI services.
  • Architect and own the core agent orchestration engine, designing complex, multi-agent LLM workflows (routing, tool-use, memory, evaluation) with deterministic fallbacks, guardrails, and auditable actions required by enterprise users.
  • Build AI-native, human-in-the-loop UIs. Craft React/Next.js interfaces that let users collaborate safely with agents, with transparency and explainability by design.
  • Develop the "factory for the factory". Build our experimentation platform: CI/CD for prompts and agents, offline/online evals, drift detection, safety layers, and rollout controls.
  • Ship fast, safely. You'll instrument everything for reliability, write concise design docs, add robust tests, and build dashboards and alerts for features you launch.
  • Partner cross-functionally with Product, AI, Design, CS; talk to customers and SMEs, and turn ambiguous problems into shipped product.
  • Obsess over performance, optimizing for latency across the system: caching, model selection, distillation, batching, vector search, and infrastructure efficiency (GPU/CPU).
  • Operate what you build. This includes on-call ownership, leading incident response, and driving learning through blameless postmortems.
  • Level-up the team around you. Mentor and collaborate with other engineers to help make the entire team better.
This role is for you if...
  • You're a 0 → 1 builder who thrives in ambiguity and has shipped products from scratch at a startup or in a hyper-growth phase. You've seen both - early-stage hustle and later-stage scale and know how to build for it.
  • You're a systems thinker with deep technical chops: you design clear architectures and write clean, tested Python and TypeScript.
  • You think like an owner: you spot problems, propose solutions, and build them without waiting for perfect specs. Your impact is measured in business outcomes.
  • You use AI as leverage. Tools like Cursor, Copilot, or Claude Code are integral to your workflow, helping you ship faster while maintaining a high standard for correctness.
  • You believe speed and quality aren't opposites and can articulate the tradeoffs you make.
  • You communicate crisply. You share your ideas effectively and thrive in tight feedback loops with product, design, and customers.
  • You've got grit: hard problems energize you, context switching doesn't scare you, and you're comfortable deleting code.
Our Stack
  • Frontend: React, Next.js
  • Backend: Python, FastAPI
  • Data/ML: MongoDB, S3, Redis; Pinecone
  • Infra: AWS, Docker, Kubernetes; CI/CD with GitHub Actions.
  • Messaging: SQS; event-driven pipelines.
Required Skills & Experiences

The successful candidate will be a high-ownership, product-minded engineer who combines strong full-stack fundamentals with experience building AI-native systems, capable of turning ambiguous problems into scalable, reliable features that drive real business impact.

Required:
  • Experience with LLM/agent systems, evals, and prompt tooling; RAG, embeddings, vector dbs.
  • Deep knowledge of event-driven systems, streaming, and workflow engines.
  • Expertise in observability (OpenTelemetry/Prometheus/Datadog), feature flagging, or A/B platforms.
  • Background in enterprise security and compliance (SOC 2, GDPR)
  • Bias to action: short specs, small PRs, daily deploys.
  • In-person collaboration: we're building the NYC hub together; whiteboards > long threads.
  • High ownership: you'll touch product, talk to customers, and influence the roadmap.
Benefits

Upon joining the Knit team, you will receive a competitive salary + commission plan if applicable to role, Equity Options, Healthcare (medical, dental, and vision), and Additional Coverage, a company laptop and one-time, onboarding Technology Stipend, a 401(k) with company match, flexible time-off, hybrid working, and more!
Salary

In accordance with New York pay transparency requirements, the salary range for this role is $250,000 - $300,000. Final compensation will be determined based on the candidate's level, experience, and qualifications upon joining Knit.

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