Senior / Staff Engineer

About sunbeam

sunbeam is building a fully autonomous SEO agent that plans, writes, and ships work end-to-end. An agent that ships work is one of the harder problems in applied AI right now. It requires reasoning over long horizons, executing reliably across systems, and owning outcomes that real customers can stake their growth on.

We believe getting this right is a game-changer for how SEO gets done.

sunbeam was built inside daydream, an AI-native SEO agency that runs SEO end-to-end for companies like Anthropic, Clay, and Replit. We are distilling what daydream learned doing the work into an autonomous agent that does the work on its own.

We've raised over $20M from First Round Capital, Basis Set Ventures, WndrCo, and SOMA Capital, and are backed by leaders from Notion, Airtable, Webflow, and Dropbox, including Lenny Rachitsky and Eli Schwartz, author of Product-Led SEO.

The team

You'll work closely with a small, highly capable team across engineering and design:

• Shravan (CTO), formerly an Engineering Lead at Flixed and a Software Engineer at Facebook, where he worked on mass-scale web scraping for Facebook Jobs and Meta Reality Labs.

• Vishruth (Founding Applied AI Engineer), previously a Data Scientist at Klaviyo specializing in NLP, with a research background from Cornell.

• Daniel (Founding Applied AI Engineer), formerly a Data Engineer on Tesla's Autopilot team and previously Lead Data Engineer at Replit.

• Tom (Founding Designer), who previously led product design at Blockless and now leads our frontend efforts.

How you’ll make an impact

As a Senior/Staff Engineer at sunbeam, you’ll provide technical leadership across the product while remaining deeply hands-on.

You’ll partner closely with the CTO to shape system architecture, guide execution, and raise the quality bar across the engineering organization. This is not a people-management role; you’ll lead through design decisions, code quality, and consistent delivery of scalable systems.

In this role, you will:

• Act as the technical lead for day-to-day engineering execution across the team

• Partner with the CTO to organize, prioritize, and sequence engineering work

• Design and evolve core system architecture, guiding implementation decisions

• Review pull requests and set standards for code quality, reliability, and maintainability

• Identify technical risks early and propose pragmatic, scalable solutions

• Mentor engineers through technical guidance, feedback, and example

• Improve engineering workflows to increase speed without sacrificing quality

• Work primarily across backend systems, data pipelines, and AI-enabled services, using Python, TypeScript, and C#, deployed on Google Cloud

Minimum Qualifications

• Significant experience building and operating production software systems

• Strong engineering judgment and comfort with making architectural tradeoffs

• Experience owning systems end-to-end, from design through long-term maintenance

• Ability to lead through influence, code, and technical decision-making rather than people management

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in a Staff or Senior Engineer role at a high-growth company

• Background in building distributed systems or complex backend platforms

• Familiarity with AI-enabled or data-intensive systems

• Strong written and verbal communication skills

• A consistently high bar for code quality, reliability, and technical excellence

Position Location

This role is based in San Francisco and requires in-person collaboration five (5) days per week. We offer paid relocation for candidates outside the San Francisco Bay Area.

Compensation

The base salary range for this role is $180,000–$280,000 depending on experience, along with meaningful equity.

What you’ll love

• Health coverage includes medical, dental, and vision with HSA and FSA options, plus One Medical, Talkspace, and Teladoc

• Commuter benefit includes a monthly reimbursement to support your commute to the office

• Meals on us include lunch reimbursement on in-office days, with dinner covered when you’re working late

• Personal well-being includes an annual stipend for gym, fitness classes, therapy, and wellness expenses

• Learning and development includes an annual stipend for books, courses, and classes to support your growth

• Team retreats include two company retreats per year to connect, collaborate, and reset

• Monthly team time includes regular dinners and outings to spend time together

• Dog-friendly office (we have corgis)