What are the responsibilities and job description for the Staff Engineer position at Avacend, Inc.?
Role: Staff Engineer (LLM and Shipped)
Location: NYC, NY (Hybrid – 2 or 3 days or Remote Options for exceptional candidates)
Duration: Full Time
About the role
This is the company''s first dedicated Staff Engineer hire.
The mission is to evolve proven customer deployments into a scalable platform. Core ownership areas:
· The agent coordination and workflow orchestration layer: reliable, stateful, auditable execution of multi-step processes across fragmented enterprise systems.
· Ingestion pipelines that turn contracts, PDFs, EDI files, and ERP exports into acanonical structured data model.
· The provenance layer: every system finding traces back to the exact contract terms and transactions supporting it.
· Platform foundations for reliability, observability, and developer velocity.
Must-haves (do not submit without all of these)
· 7–20 years of hands-on software engineering experience. Currently writing and owning code, not managing or advising. Recent depth building and owning complex backend systems.
· High-growth startup experience in recent history. Time at a Series A–D startup during a growth phase, at some point in the last several years. Candidates whose entire recent career is at large tech companies (Google, Meta, Amazon, etc.) are not afit, regardless of seniority.
· Experience building with LLMs. Production systems, serious side projects, or open-source work involving LLM-powered applications: agents, workflow orchestration, extraction pipelines, RAG, or similar. Candidates should be actively building in this space, not just familiar with it.
· Strong fundamentals in backend architecture and infrastructure. Distributed systems, data pipelines, service design, cloud infra. This is a systems role, not a prompt-engineering role.
· NYC hybrid preferred, no visa sponsorship. Remote considered only for exceptional candidates. Confirm work authorization before submitting.
Strong pluses
· Experience designing multi-agent or complex workflow orchestration systems (state management, long-running reliable execution, handoffs between services or agents).
· Background at a vertical AI company or one automating regulated, expert-driven workflows (healthcare, legal, insurance, financial operations).
· Data engineering depth: messy document/PDF/EDI ingestion, canonical schemas, pipelines.
· Strong academic credentials or other signals of exceptional caliber.
Founder or early-employee experience.
Salary : $200,000 - $300,000