About the company
This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Software Engineer - Kilo Code based in United States.
As a Staff Software Engineer, you will help shape the evolution of a flagship AI-assisted coding tool used by millions of developers worldwide.
Responsibilities
- Set technical direction for performance initiatives across startup time, memory usage, CLI communication, and related areas, establishing reusable patterns and instrumentation.
- Design, build, and ship advanced AI-assisted coding capabilities, including granular auto-approval rules, context optimization, and intelligent application workflows.
- Drive cross-team technical initiatives spanning the developer extension, backend services, and AI infrastructure, translating business priorities into actionable technical roadmaps.
- Own high-impact features end to end, from technical design and implementation through production deployment, rollout strategy, telemetry, and post-launch iteration.
- Establish engineering standards for AI coding workflows, including context-window optimization, token compression, chat interfaces, and scalable LLM integration patterns.
- Identify and prioritize technical debt, architectural risks, and performance bottlenecks while balancing rapid feature delivery with long-term system health.
- Mentor engineers through code reviews, architectural discussions, pairing, documentation, and technical guidance, helping elevate code quality, testing, and performance practices.
- Partner with Product and Design to shape roadmap priorities, assess technical feasibility, and determine pragmatic trade-offs and incremental delivery strategies.
- Use production data, telemetry, performance benchmarks, and user feedback to continuously improve product reliability, usability, and scalability.
- Contribute hands-on from the start while establishing technical patterns and practices that increase team velocity and create long-term engineering leverage.
Requirements
- 10+ years of professional software development experience, including demonstrated technical leadership on production systems serving large user populations.
- Proven ability to establish technical direction for complex projects, make architectural decisions under uncertainty, and combine hands-on engineering with technical leadership.
- Deep experience building developer tools, IDE extensions, productivity software, or comparable products serving 100K+ users.
- Expert-level TypeScript and modern JavaScript skills, including asynchronous programming, event-driven architectures, and Node.js runtime optimization.
- Strong track record of performance optimization at scale, including profiling, instrumentation, and measurable improvements in startup time, memory consumption, throughput, or related metrics.
- Experience with AI-assisted coding tools, chat interfaces, agent-based development workflows, LLM integrations, and context-window management.
- Demonstrated ability to influence technical decisions across teams and improve engineering practices through mentorship, code review, documentation, tooling, or architectural leadership.
- Strong product sense and the ability to translate business and user needs into practical technical solutions while clearly communicating trade-offs to non-engineering stakeholders.
- Experience working in mature or high-scale codebases where technical debt, reliability, performance, and feature velocity must be balanced carefully.
- Based in the United States and willing to work Eastern Time Zone hours.
- Experience with developer tooling, AI coding assistants, VS Code extensions, Electron applications, open-source projects, or technical products for data science and developer audiences is highly valued.
- A collaborative, curious, accountable mindset and the ability to operate effectively in a senior, low-process environment.
Conditions
- Base salary of $200,000–$260,000 for candidates based in New York City and San Francisco.
- Base salary of $150,000–$220,000 for other U.S.-based team members.
- Annual bonus potential and equity participation.
- Flexible vacation policy.
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance.
- Short-term and long-term disability coverage.
- Paid parental leave.
- Monthly wellness stipend.
- Employee Assistance Program and mental health resources.
- Fully remote work environment with flexible hours.
- Opportunity to work on high-impact AI, machine learning, and developer technology products.