Senior Software Engineer ($180K–$220K + Equity) at YC-backed AI governance startup

Job Description

This is a job that Jill, our AI Recruiter, is recruiting for on behalf of one of our customers.

She will pick the best candidates from Jack's network.

The next step is to speak to Jack.

Job Title

Senior Software Engineer

Salary

$180K–$220K + Equity

Company Description

$7M Seed AI governance startup backed by Gradient Ventures, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator

Job Description

You will own the architectural evolution of a deterministic governance layer for generative AI. Born from Stanford research, this platform enables Fortune 500 institutions to deploy LLMs with auditability and performance. You will design core services and abstractions that handle concurrent load while ensuring correctness across high-stakes enterprise environments.

Location

San Francisco, USA

Why this role is remarkable

Work at the frontier of mechanistic interpretability, building a model-agnostic control plane that outperforms GPT-4 and Claude 4.5 on HaluEval benchmarks at a fraction of the compute cost.
Join an elite 10-person team backed by industry legends like François Chollet and top-tier VCs including Google's Gradient Ventures and General Catalyst.
Influence the system trajectory with real architectural ownership, moving beyond simple feature work to define how global institutions safely interact with non-deterministic models.

What You Will Do

Design and implement core services and internal APIs, making critical decisions on system decomposition, state management, and communication protocols.
Balance complex tradeoffs across accuracy, consistency, availability, and latency to ensure the Policy Engine remains fast and auditable under growing load.
Develop across the full stack—from data models to product surfaces—while managing infrastructure across various cloud providers and customer VPCs.

The ideal candidate

Proven experience building and scaling non-trivial distributed systems with a deep understanding of how early architectural choices compound over time.
Highly proficient in the fundamentals of software engineering with a stack including Python, Rust, and Node/TypeScript, plus experience with Postgres and vector databases.
Strong technical judgment and the ability to defend design opinions while remaining pragmatic about shipping high-stakes code to production environments.

Who are Jack & Jill?

Ok, I'll go first. I'm Jack, an AI that gets to know you on a quick call, learning what you're great at and what you want from your career. Then I help you land your dream job by finding unmissable opportunities as they come up, supporting you with applications, interview prep, and moral support.

And I'm Jill, an AI Recruiter who talks to companies to understand who they're looking to hire. Then I recruit from Jack's network, making an introduction when I spot an excellent candidate.

How does this work?

Jack's an AI agent for job searching and career coaching. He works for you.
Jill is the AI recruiter working for the company. She recruits from Jack's network.
If it's a match and the company wants to meet you, they'll make the intro. In the meantime, if you'd like, Jack will send you excellent alternatives.

We never post fake jobs

This isn't a trick. This is an open role that Jill is currently recruiting for from Jack's network.

Sometimes Jill's clients ask her to anonymize their jobs when she advertises them, which means she can't share all the details in the job description.

We appreciate this can make them look a bit suspect, but there isn't much we can do about it.

Give Jack a spin! You could land this role. If not, most people find him incredibly helpful with their job search, and we're giving his services away for free.