Staff Software Engineer

THE ROLE This is a hands-on senior or staff-level individual-contributor role at the intersection of applied AI, product, and distributed systems. You'll take ambiguous customer problems and complex product initiatives, turn them into focused architectures, and ship simple, reliable systems in production. You'll build AI workers across the stack, from customer-facing experiences to long-running agent workflows and integrations with legacy ERPs and CRMs. You'll lead 0→1 initiatives, improve agent performance and reliability, help set model and agent strategy, and evolve our infrastructure as customer usage and model capabilities grow. Technical leadership at Forgepoint means writing and operating core product code while raising the bar for the team through clear technical writing, thoughtful code review, mentorship, and better developer tooling. Our stack is TypeScript end-to-end with React, Node.js, and PostgreSQL, running on AWS and Kubernetes. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Lead complex product initiatives from customer discovery and technical design through implementation, rollout, and production operation - Turn broad product requirements into focused architecture documents, clear tradeoffs, and incremental execution plans - Build core AI product experiences and the agent workflows, tools, and integrations behind them - Improve agent performance, reliability, and cost as usage grows and new models arrive - Design and operate distributed systems, including queues, workers, observability, and failure recovery - Help set technical strategy across models, agent architecture, context management, infrastructure, and developer experience - Raise the engineering bar through simple design, testing, code review, and operational follow-through - Mentor engineers and create patterns, documentation, and feedback loops that make the team more effective WHO YOU ARE - You have 7+ years of product engineering experience and a track record of designing, shipping, and operating important systems; experience across both a high-growth startup and a scaled engineering organization is a plus - You are a strong systems thinker who can reduce a complex domain to clear boundaries and maintainable software - You have a product mindset: you learn how customers work, notice patterns, and connect technical decisions to customer value - You care deeply about code quality and reliability, but avoid abstraction or complexity for its own sake - You communicate clearly with technical and non-technical teammates and make others better through writing, code review, mentorship, and candid feedback - You form thoughtful opinions about fast-moving AI technology and choose models, architectures, and context strategies based on evidence - You are ambitious, resourceful, action-oriented, and team-first; you care about strengthening American manufacturing and are excited to work in person five days a week in NYC BONUS POINTS - Deep experience with TypeScript, Node.js, React, or PostgreSQL - Experience with AWS, Kubernetes, queues, streaming, caching, retries, consistency, and observability - Experience building a large surface area of third-party integrations, especially with legacy systems - Experience building software for manufacturing or another operationally complex industry ABOUT FORGEPOINT Revitalize an industry. Rebuild America's manufacturing backbone. America builds satellites, jet engines, semiconductors, and more with world-class precision, but the software running factory offices is decades behind. Estimators, procurement teams, and engineers still lose hours to spreadsheets, PDFs, and manual data entry. Forgepoint builds AI workers for non-production departments — think inside sales, quoting, and procurement. By removing back-office bottlenecks, we help US manufacturers move faster, grow, and compete globally. We're backed by a16z speedrun and angels from Brex, Xwing, and Betterment. Join us in rebuilding the digital foundation of American manufacturing. OUR FOUNDERS Jack Strauss — Co-Founder & CEO Jack began his career at Acer and Northrop Grumman, then advised industrial companies at Bain. At Xwing, he helped scale the company and led GTM through its acquisition by Joby Aviation. He holds an MBA from Stanford and a BA from USC. Alex Pareto — Co-Founder & CTO Alex began at Meta, then founded YC-backed Demeanor which was acquired by NTWRK. He later became a founding engineer on Brex Spend Management, and ultimately the Head of Engineering for that organization. He holds a BS in Computer Science from USC. HOW WE WORK - In person every day in NYC for high-bandwidth collaboration. - Talk to users constantly—we build with manufacturers, not for them. - Own outcomes end-to-end and drive solutions without waiting for permission. - Prefer simple, incremental systems that solve the real problem and are easy to operate. OUR VALUES - We're Here to Win: We are building to help American manufacturers, our customers, our company, and our teammates win at the highest level. - There's Always a Way: We are relentlessly resourceful, take ownership of constraints, and find a path forward when others stop. - Truth Over Comfort: We choose honesty over ego, surface reality quickly, and change course when the facts demand it. - Act Now: We move fast, trust our instincts, and correct course as we go. - Step Up: We act like founders, fill gaps, fix problems, and follow through until the work is done. - The Team. The Team. The Team.: We put the team first, push and support each other, share wins, and own failures together. COMP & BENEFITS - Top-tier salary and equity. - Great healthcare. - Dinner at the office. - Unlimited Celsius. - Travel across the USA to spend time with customers on their shop floors. LOCATION Onsite in New York City, five days a week.