About the job Staff / Senior Engineer — Varick Agents
Staff / Senior Engineer — Varick Agents
Location: San Francisco, CA (Onsite, 5 days/week)
Compensation: $225,000 – $300,000 base + equity
Experience Level: 6+ years (2+ years as Staff, Principal, or Founding Engineer)
Employment Type: Full-Time
About Varick Agents
Varick Agents builds custom AI agents for Fortune 500 and enterprise customers ranging from $1B to $100B in annual revenue. The company specializes in applied AI systems that automate complex operational workflows and maintains a reported 100% production deployment success rate. The team includes talent from Meta, AWS Bedrock, Citadel Securities, McKinsey, and Stanford.
About the Role
This is a senior technical leadership role owning the architecture of Varick's AI platform — from agent orchestration and process-mining infrastructure to the control plane that turns audit outputs into deployed AI systems. You will drive engineering velocity, recruit and mentor engineers, bridge frontier AI research and production deployments, and help scale the company from services to platform.
What You'll Own
- Own the technical architecture of the platform
- Design and build agent orchestration systems
- Build process-mining infrastructure and diagnostic pipelines
- Develop the control plane that turns audit outputs into deployed AI systems
- Architect production AI systems at scale
- Build multi-agent workflows, retrieval systems, evaluation frameworks, and governance layers
- Drive engineering velocity and technical decision-making
- Recruit, mentor, and lead engineers
- Establish engineering standards and review processes
- Bridge frontier AI research and production deployments
- Help scale the company from services to platform
Requirements
- 6+ years of software engineering experience
- 2+ years as Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, Founding Engineer, or equivalent
- Deep production AI/ML systems experience — inference, orchestration, evaluation, and monitoring
- Strong systems design and architecture skills
- Ownership mentality and high agency
- Strong recruiting and leadership capability
- SF-based or willing to relocate
Target Backgrounds
Strong signals include backgrounds from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, xAI, Meta FAIR, founding engineer roles at high-growth AI startups, and senior engineers at AI-native startups with production agent systems, multi-agent orchestration, AI infrastructure ownership, distributed systems expertise, and personally architected systems deployed to production. Ideal roles: Founding Engineer, Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, AI Infrastructure Engineer, ML Platform Engineer, CTO, Technical Founder, Applied AI Engineer, Distributed Systems Engineer, or Agent Systems Architect.
Nice to Have
- Agent systems, compound AI workflows, LLM applications in production
- Process mining, workflow automation, enterprise integrations
- Kubernetes, distributed systems, cloud architecture
- Prior CTO experience, open-source contributions, or published AI/ML research
This Role Is NOT For
- Staff titles without meaningful architecture ownership
- Engineers who consumed existing infrastructure without building it
- Weak coding ability or hand-wavy scalability discussions
- Pure research backgrounds without production systems
- Big-tech-only experience without ownership or low agency
Interview Process
- Initial screen
- First round
- Second round
- Third round
- Onsite
- Offer
Logistics
- Role is fully onsite in San Francisco — 5 days/week — please only apply if you can commit to this
Shortlisted candidates will be contacted by David Joseph & Co., the recruiting partner managing this search on behalf of Varick Agents.