Member of Technical Staff, TLM, Context Engineering

What You'll Do

• Lead the Context roadmap, partnering with the CTO, Head of Engineering, and product leadership on priorities
• Hire and develop a team of 4 to 8 engineers, including running interview loops, calibrating performance, and setting expectations clearly
• Drive technical decisions on hard problems: retrieval quality and how we measure it, graph and memory schemas that survive contact with real customer data, sync architectures that stay correct under partial failure, and an integration framework that makes the tenth connector cheaper to build than the first
• Own retrieval quality as a measurable product surface, with evals that catch regressions before customers do
• Ship code yourself on the highest-leverage parts of the system
• Be the engineering point of contact when a customer's integration breaks, their data goes stale, or an agent retrieves the wrong thing
• Represent Context in conversations with product, sales engineering, and the executive team when data access, freshness, or security commitments are on the line
• Partner closely with the teams building our agent products, who are your primary internal customers

Who You Are

• 7+ years of backend engineering experience, with at least 2 years managing or tech-leading a team
• Strong Python. This is the language the team lives in
• Rust is strongly preferred. Parts of this system are performance and cost sensitive enough to justify it, and we expect that surface to grow
• Hands-on experience building search or retrieval systems in production: embeddings, vector stores, hybrid search, reranking, and chunking strategies, along with an honest view of where each one stops helping
• Experience integrating with third-party APIs at scale, including OAuth, token refresh, rate limits, and the operational reality of connectors that break on someone else's schedule
• Experience with data synchronization and pipeline correctness: incremental sync, idempotency, backfills, and reconciliation
• Strong Postgres skills; you can reason about indexes, query plans, multi-tenant data models, and migrations without reaching for a tutorial
• Experience hiring senior ICs and giving direct, useful feedback
• Comfortable being an IC contributor on the team you manage; we don't want a manager who has stopped writing code

Nice to have

• Experience with knowledge graphs or entity resolution at scale
• Experience building memory systems or context management for LLM agents, including context budgeting and retrieval tuning against real workloads
• Familiarity with MCP as both a server and a client implementer
• Experience with high-volume event ingestion and streaming systems
• Background at a B2B SaaS company that sold to enterprise, where customer data handling passed a real security review (SOC 2, ISO 27001, CMEK, private networking)
• A track record of building evaluation harnesses for non-deterministic systems

Location

This is an on-site role based in our SF office, designed for builders who thrive on speed, iteration, and meaningful impact.

Pay and benefits

For this role, the expected base salary range is $230,000 to $275,000, depending on experience. Profound's total compensation package includes base salary, equity, and a full range of benefits and perks. Final compensation will depend on factors such as your skills, experience, qualifications, and location, and will be determined during the interview process. Our recruiting team will share more details about the full compensation package and benefits as you move through hiring.

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