Staff Software Engineer

Why Vizcom

Vizcom turns generative AI into a daily tool for industrial and product designers. Sketches and references become dozens of real variations in seconds—inside a collaborative browser app used by enterprise design teams in footwear, automotive, consumer electronics, and more.

We’re well-funded (Series B), growing double-digits MoM, and expanding the core engineering team in SF. The surface area is big: realtime collaboration, GPU inference at scale, a modern TypeScript stack, and enterprise-grade reliability/security.

The Role

Own the technical direction of a product that blends heavy frontend UX with serious backend/infrastructure. You’ll raise the engineering bar through design reviews, hands-on prototyping, and pragmatic standards—while mentoring engineers into future tech leads.

What You’ll Do

• Set the architecture roadmap to keep Vizcom reliable, scalable, and a joy to develop in as usage, models, and data grow.

• Ship hands-on: jump into code for critical paths, rapid prototypes, and hairy debugging (latency, memory, race conditions, WebGL/WASM quirks).

• Install quality guardrails that scale: test strategy, code-review norms, perf budgets, observability baselines.

• Mentor and multiply: develop senior engineers into tech leads; model clear written design and crisp decision-making.

• Partner cross-functionally: represent engineering trade-offs with Product/Design/Go-To-Market; act as the CTO’s delegate when needed.

90-Day Outcomes

• Reliability & perf: land an observability-driven plan for our top-5 critical flows; reduce p95 for at least one user-visible flow by ~30% through targeted fixes (query plans, caching, batching, streaming, GPU/CPU boundaries).

• Architecture: author one substantial RFC (e.g., realtime doc model, rendering pipeline boundaries, or background job topology) and lead it to adoption.

• Team health: mentor two engineers with measurable growth (scope, design quality, or incident handling).

• Developer experience: remove one persistent friction (local env speed, CI flakiness, or flaky e2e surface) and document the standard.

The Problems You’ll Tackle

• High-fanout realtime collaboration (WebSockets/CRDT-style data models).

• GPU-backed image generation pipelines and queueing with bursty workloads.

• Performance across the stack: React/Vite bundles, GraphQL n+1s, Postgres query plans, caching at the right layer.

• Enterprise-grade SSO/SAML/SCIM, auditability, and secure multi-tenant boundaries.

• A design-forward UX that must still feel instant under load.

Our Stack (today)

• Frontend: TypeScript, React, Vite, WebGL; realtime collaboration.

• API/Backend: TypeScript/Node, GraphQL (PostGraphile), Postgres, Redis, background workers.

• Infra: Kubernetes, Pulumi, CI/CD with GitHub Actions, Datadog for observability, feature flags.

• Security/Enterprise: SSO/SAML (WorkOS), SOC 2-minded practices.

Experience with every item isn’t required—you should be excited to shape it.

What Great Looks Like

• You’ve led systems at scale in TS/Node (or similar) and know where complexity should live (and shouldn’t).

• You’re equally comfortable writing code and writing RFCs—and your reviews make everyone better.

• You communicate precisely (written first), make trade-offs explicit, and keep momentum without hand-waving.

• You lead through influence, not title; people invite you to reviews because you raise the conversation.

Qualifications

• 8–12+ years building distributed web systems (TypeScript/Node preferred) with 2+ years at Staff scope.

• Depth with Postgres and performance/observability (profiling, traces, query tuning).

• Experience with container orchestration and production ops (K8s or equivalent).

• Bonus: realtime collaboration models, WebGL/WASM, GPU workloads, or enterprise identity (SSO/SAML/SCIM).

How We Work

• Small team, high ownership. Fewer people, more leverage.

• Design-centric. We obsess over speed and feel; “fast enough” usually isn’t.

• Write it down. RFCs, crisp decisions, living docs.

• Operate what you build. Everyone on call support; incidents drive improvement, not blame.

Compensation & Benefits

We pay top-of-market for Staff/Principal talent in SF and include meaningful equity. Full benefits and the gear you need to do the best work of your career.

Interview Process (fast; no leetcode)

1. Intro (30m): mutual fit, role/impact.

2. Architectural deep-dive (60–75m): a real Vizcom problem; you drive the trade-offs.

3. Hands-on working session (90m): pair on a small, realistic slice.

4. Cross-functional chat (30m): product/design collaboration.

5. Founder/CTO conversation (30–45m): values, scope, expectations.

6. References & offer.

Ready to build?

If you want your work to be used daily by world-class designers—and you like owning problems end-to-end—let’s talk. Apply with links (GitHub, LinkedIn, notable projects) and a short note on something hard you shipped.