Staff Software Engineer

About the role

You will design and deliver the backend systems and product interfaces that power Nectar Social's AI-native social operating system, owning the full lifecycle of critical features from initial design through production scale. You will partner closely with product and design to translate ambiguous problems into resilient, user-centric solutions that deepen brand relationships on social. You will lead architectural decisions across the stack, balancing scalability, reliability, and cost as we process large volumes of social data for thousands of brands. You will raise the engineering quality bar by establishing strong practices in code review, testing, and on-call processes as the platform and team grow. You will mentor engineers, provide technical leadership, and help shape a high-performance engineering culture aligned with our mission. You will build AI-powered experiences such as conversation inboxes and AI-suggested replies while optimizing them for performance and clarity. You will take end-to-end responsibility for your work, navigating fast-moving startup conditions with curiosity, ownership, and strong judgment.

Key facts

What you'll do

Backend & Data Infrastructure

• Design and build backend systems that ingest and process large volumes of social data from platforms like Instagram, TikTok, X, and LinkedIn.
• Develop resilient integrations with third-party APIs and optimize the infrastructure that powers our AI workloads.
• Improve reliability, performance, and cost efficiency across our backend and data pipelines as the platform scales.
• Establish operational best practices including monitoring, incident response, and on-call culture.
• Implement robust data pipelines that ensure quality, observability, and durability across distributed systems.
• Collaborate with data and platform teams to evolve schemas, storage strategies, and processing workflows.
• Drive standardization and automation for deployment, configuration, and environment management.
• Troubleshoot complex production issues using deep system knowledge and telemetry.

Product & Frontend

• Build AI-powered product experiences such as conversation inboxes, AI-suggested replies, and summarization of social conversations into actionable insights.
• Improve shared components, design systems, and frontend architecture to enable faster and higher-quality product development.
• Optimize performance and reliability across the application as it scales to support thousands of daily users.
• Collaborate closely with product and design teams to deliver intuitive workflows for brand and marketing teams.
• Ensure frontend architecture supports modularity, testability, and smooth interaction with backend services.
• Implement responsive and accessible interfaces that help brands understand, manage, and respond to social conversations.
• Measure and iterate on user experience using data and feedback to refine flows and reduce friction.
• Work across the stack to ship features quickly while maintaining stability and performance.

Technical Leadership

• Write architecture documents and guide infrastructure, tooling, and frontend decisions across the engineering team.
• Review technical designs and code from other engineers, providing feedback that raises the quality bar across the team.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to building strong engineering culture and development practices.
• Collaborate with cross-functional partners to align technical strategy with product and business goals.
• Identify risks and trade-offs in system designs, and advocate for improvements in reliability and maintainability.
• Champion the adoption of AI tools in day-to-day workflows, such as Cursor, Claude Code, Graphite, and Granola.
• Define and evolve the technical roadmap for core product experiences and platform capabilities.
• Represent engineering in discussions with stakeholders to ensure alignment on priorities and constraints.

Requirements

• Strong engineering experience designing, building, and operating production systems, with depth in backend, frontend, or full-stack development.
• Deep understanding of system design, distributed systems, and scalable architecture principles.
• Experience building reliable data pipelines on top of external APIs, or building complex, data-rich web applications using React.
• Strong user empathy and product intuition when designing and building features that serve brand and marketing teams.
• Experience mentoring engineers and actively shaping engineering culture and development practices.
• Curiosity about how AI is changing software development and interest in AI-assisted engineering workflows.
• Comfort operating in a fast-moving startup environment with high ownership and end-to-end responsibility.
• Ability to communicate clearly and collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams in a remote-first, asynchronous culture.

Nice to have

• Experience working with high-scale data pipelines or real-time data processing systems.
• Experience building AI-powered user interfaces or LLM-integrated product features.
• Experience building analytics dashboards or data-heavy interfaces.
• Experience integrating AI or machine learning systems into production environments.
• Previous experience working at an early-stage or rapidly scaling startup.

Practical notes

• Hybrid work schedule: 4 days in office with 3 flex remote days per quarter, available after 3 months.
• This role is full-time and based in Palo Alto, California.
• Compensation includes competitive pay and early equity, along with comprehensive benefits and stipends as described in the offer section.