Staff Software Engineer (AI)

Location: San Francisco, United States; hybrid

Salary: $220,000–$331,000 total target cash for the San Francisco Bay Area, inclusive of bonus or commission.

Company

hirify.global develops an AI analytics platform used by thousands of product, data, and marketing teams to analyze, test, and optimize digital experiences.

What you will do

• Build and evolve Nova’s query execution engine and distributed compute layer, including query planning, columnar storage, encoding, compression, caching, and cluster resource management.
• Extend Nova to support additional warehouse-imported data types such as metrics, profiles, and dimensions.
• Design the system for sustained, concurrent, high-throughput query workloads generated by AI agents.
• Reduce compute, storage, network, and memory costs while improving latency and throughput; optimize JVM performance, garbage collection, memory management, concurrency, and data layout.
• Improve reliability through observability, capacity planning, safe rollouts, incident response, and durable architectural fixes.
• Lead multi-month projects, contribute to architecture discussions and code reviews, mentor engineers, and collaborate with Product, Middleware, Data Pipeline, and other engineering teams.

Requirements

• 7+ years of industry experience in backend or infrastructure engineering with depth in distributed data systems.
• Hands-on experience building or extending analytical or OLAP systems, query engines, columnar storage, or large-scale data-processing frameworks.
• Experience driving significant cloud infrastructure cost optimization across compute, storage, and networking.
• Strong fundamentals in distributed systems, partitioning, replication, consistency, failover, algorithms, concurrency, multithreading, and performance optimization.
• Production experience with AWS, Kafka, Redis or ElastiCache, Kubernetes, Terraform, or equivalent technologies.
• Proficiency in Java, C++, or Python, plus demonstrated technical leadership, cross-team influence, and mentoring experience.

Nice to have

• Experience with Druid, ClickHouse, Presto or Trino, BigQuery, Snowflake, or similar OLAP systems.
• Deep JVM expertise, including garbage-collection tuning, profiling, and memory optimization.
• Experience with Arrow, Parquet, ORC, or custom columnar formats and encodings.
• Background in product analytics, experimentation platforms, event-driven data systems, open-source data infrastructure, or published data-systems work.

Culture & Benefits

• Values include humility, ownership, growth mindset, and customer centricity.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer-paid premiums on select plans.
• Flexible time off, paid holidays, parental leave, fertility and adoption support, backup childcare, and mental health benefits.
• Monthly wellness and commuter stipends, learning and development support, and home office equipment allowances.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer matching and an Employee Stock Purchase Program.
• Mentorship programs, management training, charitable giving grants, and paid volunteer time off.