Collective is looking to redefine the way businesses-of-one work by moving their platform from traditional automation toward autonomous AI Agents, aiming to empower self-employed people to enjoy the same tax savings that big companies get.
Requirements
- Proven experience as a Staff+ engineer who has remained hands-on.
- You have either built production AI features or have deep personal projects involving LLMs and Agents.
- You understand the challenges of non-deterministic outputs and context windows.
- Deep understanding of architectural patterns, but with the pragmatism to know when a monolith is better than microservices.
- You can navigate complex organizational problems and build consensus, but you prioritize shipping value over endless debate.
- While you may lean backend, you understand the entire lifecycle of a request, from the React component to the database query plan.
- Python (Django/FastAPI), React, TypeScript.
Responsibilities
- Write Production Code: You will take on the most ambiguous and difficult technical challenges, shipping high-quality, scalable code that serves as a blueprint for the rest of the team.
- Prototype & Validate: Build Proof of Concepts (PoCs) and "walking skeletons" to validate technical decisions before broader rollout.
- Agentic Workflow Development: Lead the engineering effort to integrate LLMs and Agent-based architectures into our core product, transitioning manual back-office operations into autonomous software workflows.
- Define multi-team architectures that solve real business problems.
- Ensure our move toward distributed systems and microservices is pragmatic, not just academic.
- Mentor Senior Engineers not just through 1:1s, but through code reviews, design pairing, and debugging sessions.
- Champion org-wide quality. If the build is broken or a system is flaky, you jump in to fix it and build the tooling to ensure it doesn't happen again.
Other
- This is a Player/Coach role: we need someone who can define the technical vision for the organization and then roll up their sleeves to write the reference implementations that set the standard.
- Based in San Francisco with a balance of in-office and remote flexibility.
- Flexible PTO plus 14 company holidays.
- The "Builder" Mindset:
- Pragmatic Leadership:
