Staff Software Engineer, Collective
$230-290k
+ Equity
More information about location
Back-office platform for self-employed people
Open for applications
Back-office platform for self-employed people
201-500 employees
Open for applications
$230-290k
+ Equity
More information about location
201-500 employees
Company mission
To empower Businesses-of-One to succeed for the life of their business and beyond.
Role
Who you are
- We’re looking for an exceptional Staff Software Engineer who leads from the front
- The "Builder" Mindset: Proven experience as a Staff+ engineer who has remained hands-on. You are uncomfortable if you go a week without committing code
- AI/Agent Curiosity or Experience: You have either built production AI features or have deep personal projects involving LLMs and Agents. You understand the challenges of non-deterministic outputs and context windows
- Distributed Systems Expertise: Deep understanding of architectural patterns, but with the pragmatism to know when a monolith is better than microservices
- Pragmatic Leadership: You can navigate complex organizational problems and build consensus, but you prioritize shipping value over endless debate
- Full-Stack Fluency: While you may lean backend, you understand the entire lifecycle of a request, from the React component to the database query plan
What the job involves
- You won't just design systems in a vacuum; you will build them
- This is a Player/Coach role: we need someone who can define the technical vision for the organization and then roll up their sleeves to write the reference implementations that set the standard
- You will play a pivotal role in our next technological leap: moving our platform from traditional automation toward autonomous AI Agents
- You will own technical roadmaps, mentor senior engineers through pair programming, and ship critical code for our most complex features
- Lead by Example (The "Player" Aspect)
- Write Production Code: Spend a significant portion of your time coding. You will take on the most ambiguous and difficult technical challenges, shipping high-quality, scalable code that serves as a blueprint for the rest of the team
- Prototype & Validate: Don’t just document architecture—prove it. Build Proof of Concepts (PoCs) and "walking skeletons" to validate technical decisions before broader rollout
- Agentic Workflow Development: Lead the engineering effort to integrate LLMs and Agent-based architectures into our core product, transitioning manual back-office operations into autonomous software workflows
- Drive Technical Vision (The "Coach" Aspect)
- Architecture with Context: Define multi-team architectures that solve real business problems
- Ensure our move toward distributed systems and microservices is pragmatic, not just academic
- High-Impact Mentorship: Mentor Senior Engineers not just through 1:1s, but through code reviews, design pairing, and debugging sessions
- Elevate the team’s coding standards by demonstrating what "great" looks like
- Operational Excellence: Champion org-wide quality. If the build is broken or a system is flaky, you jump in to fix it and build the tooling to ensure it doesn't happen again
- Tech stack & environment:
- Core: Python (Django/FastAPI), React, TypeScript
- Data/Infra: PostgreSQL, Redis, AWS, Docker/Kubernetes
- AI/ML (Emerging): LLM integration (OpenAI/Anthropic), LangChain/LangGraph, Vector Databases, and Agentic frameworks
Our take
Collective is tapping into the quickly growing freelance and self employed workforce with a back office platform which provides full support for accounting, tax, book keeping and other financial admin, essentially removing the burden from the business owner entirely.
Having only launched in 2020, Collective didn’t take long to receive major backing from General Catalyst as well as Ashton Kutcher’s VC fund Sound Ventures. It’s put it to great use too, with an employee headcount now in the hundreds, showing just how fast the startup is growing.
Interestingly, Collective isn’t available for any and all subscribers. Rather, it only allows applicants to become members if Collective’s advisors know they can offer real value. It may seem a counter-intuitive move, but it keeps the company’s success rate high.
The company's latest 2023 funding round is being used to accelerate the implementation of AI across its operations as well as onboard the nearly 100,000 waitlisted businesses. it launched an AI accounting platform for one-person operations in 2024, exemplifying the savvy use of its funds.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
44% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
Jul 2023
$50m
EARLY VC
May 2021
$20m
SERIES A
Total funding: $78.7m
Company benefits
- A remote first environment
- A diverse and collaborative team culture
- Competitive salary and stock options package
- 11 company holidays + unlimited PTO
- 401K
- Employer paid Health, Vision and Dental Insurance
- 100% coverage for employees
- 75% coverage for dependents
- PC or Mac laptop + $750 Home office stipend
- Paid parental leave
- Team events, virtual gatherings
- $600 wellness bonus
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Hooman Radfar
(CEO & Co-Founder)Previously co-founded and was CEO of AddThis (acquired by Oracle), and was a founding partner at early stage startup accelerator Expa.
Ugur Kaner
(Member of the Board of Directors & Co-Founder)Was CPO before taking on an Advisor role. Joined YC startup in 2015 MBX as VP of Product Design, building multi-brand beauty and personal care startup Memebox. Helped to build the now public Udemy, and has worked with Google, Angry Birds, and Nokia.
Bugra Akcay
(Member of the Board of Directors & Co-Founder)Co-founded and was CTO of Hike, an accounting and tax platform for freelancers which preluded Collective. Was also the co-founder and CTO of Cici Meze, an enterprise food informatics company.
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