Lead Software Engineer

Commercial Programming Systems, Inc. (CPS) is an Information Technology consulting and staffing company offering a broad range of services aimed at helping our clients deliver high-quality, cost-effective systems.

We are currently searching for a Lead Software Engineer

to support our client located in the Palo Alto, CA area for a full time hire position. This is an onsite position, and the selected person will need to work onsite.

About the role

Early-stage funded AI startup hiring our first engineer. Reporting to the founders, you'll own the technical foundation of our product, the data and model pipelines, cloud infrastructure, developer tooling, and the application layer built on top.

This is a high-ownership role for someone who wants to shape both the codebase and the engineering culture of a small, ambitious team.

What you'll do:

• Build the pipelines that ingest, process, and transform data for our models
• Stand up and operate cloud infrastructure across compute, storage, networking, and deployment
• Build the orchestration layer connecting ingestion, training, inference, evaluation, and serving
• Establish CI/CD, monitoring, logging, and alerting from the ground up
• Contribute to the application layer APIs, services, and user-facing surfaces on top of the platform
• Make foundational architectural decisions and partner with the founders on technical

strategy

What we're looking for:

• Strong Python and SQL fundamentals
• Hands-on experience building production data pipelines (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect, or similar)
• Working proficiency with AWS, GCP, or Azure, including provisioning, IAM, and networking
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes (or a managed equivalent)
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, or CDK)
• Backend API design (REST, GraphQL, or gRPC) and working knowledge of auth
• Relational database design and query optimization (Postgres or similar)
• Proficient with AI developer tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or GitHub Copilot
• A track record of operating across the stack and debugging complex systems
• Sound judgment on engineering trade-offs
• You don't need a decade of experience — what matters is a first-principles understanding of the stack and a history of building end-to-end systems.

Nice to have:

• Real-time data streaming systems (Kafka, Pub/Sub, Kinesis, Flink, or similar)
• Open-source contributions
• Experience with health or clinical data
• Full-stack product experience, including shipping user-facing web applications

What we offer

• Early-stage equity and meaningful ownership of the technical roadmap
• Competitive base salary
• A small, high-trust team where your work directly shapes the product
• The opportunity to build it the right way, from day one

Commercial Programming Systems, Inc. (CPS) is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. CPS does not permit or condone any form of discrimination or harassment based on race, color, religion, national origin, gender, disability, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, or gender identity by the Company’s managers, associates, or vendors.