Staff Software Engineer - (Backend Focus) - Infrastructure

About

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer with 7-8+ years of experience to architect the core intelligence behind Harmonic's Scout product. This individual will be crucial in defining scalable frameworks for data ingestion, ranking, personalization, and model orchestration, ensuring highly personalized and high-quality results for venture capital firms. They will also lead agentic experimentation and evaluation, pushing the boundaries of AI and LLM integrations in production to redefine software and push on this frontier.

What will you be doing?

• Architect the end-to-end sourcing engine from data ingestion, ranking, personalization, and model orchestration.
• Define scalable frameworks for retrieval, reranking, and LLM driven evaluation.
• Drive technical discovery for emerging technologies like memory systems, schema, prompt libraries, and agentic frameworks.
• Partner with product and design to define intuitive and fast LLM powered sourcing patterns.
• Mentor and guide engineers, raising the bar for system design, documentation, and technical decision making.

Tech Stack

• dbt
• Postgres
• Python
• Google Cloud Platform
• Terraform
• TypeScript
• React
• Elastic Search

Responsibilities

• Influence and execute the overall vision of Harmonic's offerings by collaborating with Product & Design to create products that help customers discover startups.
• Translate the needs of our customers by deeply understanding their needs and innovating our product features and services to exceed their expectations, ultimately enhancing their experience.
• "Get Shit Done" by working on every layer of our stack, proactively troubleshooting, and solving any issues that stand in the way of our customers gaining maximum value from our product.

Seniority

• 7+ years of experience in backend software engineering, building distributed systems or large scale backend architecture

Work Experience

• Designed and scaled search/recommendation/ranking systems
• Led or heavily contributed to ML/LLM integrations in production
• Track record of technical leadership and mentoring

Education

• CS degree from a Top 50 undergraduate program

Skills

• Strong experience with data-intensive systems and asynchronous processing
• Experience building event-driven architectures
• High energy and enthusiasm with positive contributions to discussions, and someone we would want to partner with every day
• Strong communication skills; capable of streamlined and thoughtful discussion contributions to technical and non-technical topics

Location

• NYC-based, in office 3 days/week