Staff Engineer — Tanagram

Tanagram's mission is to accelerate agentic coding. We automatically find all the engineering lessons buried in codebases, code reviews, incident post-mortems, and Slack chats, and turn them into real-time guardrails that flag or fix risky patterns in coding agents and PRs, so that teams can ship faster and avoid disaster.

We're building a small, diverse team of exceptional engineers who are excited about the future of agentic coding and care deeply about creating tools that make software development faster and more reliable. We're looking for meticulous, high-agency people who have good judgment around what problems to solve, the skills to build a great product around it, and the hunger to iterate towards better versions.

You’ll be working across the stack, including our Typescript+React frontend, Python/Go backend, and LLM infrastructure. You should have a good intuition for the right tools to use, and how to configure, combine, and tweak them to deliver the best results for our users.

You bias towards action, and eagerly jump on things (or assign an agent) “now” rather than “later” or “tomorrow”. You say what you're going to do, and you do it (quickly).

We work hybrid in-person in San Francisco (our office is in Mission Bay) and NYC, but are open to remote for strong candidates.

Here's a guide to how we work.

• Talk directly to users: understand their requirements, build what they ask for, ask for their feedback, follow up as needed, and iterate based on what they say.

• Craft delightful product interactions.

• Proactively identify and implement improvements to our product and foundations (e.g. propose improvements to our core product; add database indices to better serve a feature; build internal tooling to manage the user experience around a feature).

• Other things that may come up from time to time to move our company forward (or keep the lights on).

• Collaborate closely with teammates and share learnings openly — we value thoughtful discussion as much as rapid iteration.

• Share and promote your work publicly (e.g. on Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc).

• Challenging work on enterprise-scale codebases and datasets.

• Unlimited token usage for development using Amp.

• High compensation (and a long runway).

• Employee-friendly equity terms (low FMV, early exercise, extended exercise).

• Your choice of Macbook Pro + computer/office equipment stipend.

• Health, dental, and vision insurance.

• A relatively un-chaotic working environment (we aren't pivoting every week).

• An opportunity to lead and define our company.

• Experience building 0 to 1 products, either as a founder, or early engineer at a funded startup.

• Hands-on experience with the latest AI models, with a strong intuition about model capabilities, the behavioral nuances of each, and how to prompt them to get the best results.

• Data science experience, especially around clustering and anomaly detection.

• Clear and thoughtful communication on technical and strategic topics: at this stage, you'll be helping build the foundations of our company. You should have ideas/opinions about almost everything we do, and you should be forthcoming with your thoughts (even if it means being disagreeable).

• Well-crafted, tastefully-design work examples.

• Bonus points:

  • Experience working on programming language tooling: compilers/parsers/indexers (e.g. LLVM, tree-sitter, SCIP) or type systems (e.g. Typescript itself or Sorbet).

We encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet every qualification listed. We value potential, curiosity, and a willingness to learn as much as we value prior experience. Tanagram is committed to building a diverse and inclusive team — we believe different perspectives make us stronger.

Depending on the relevance and amount of your experience:

• Salary for this position ranges from $180,000 to $250,000 USD

• Equity ranges from 0.5% to 2%.

If we move forward with an offer, you will have a choice between more cash or more equity.