Chief Engineer (Principal Engineer)

San Francisco, United States
Full-time

About the role

What we're looking for:

We need a senior-most individual contributor (Principal/Distinguished level) or hands-on technical founder with 10+ years of experience building core systems in production at real scale — someone who has taken a hard, ambiguous bet from 0→1 and owned a company-defining system others depend on. You should have deep credibility in AI and agents, extreme AI fluency with daily use of frontier tools like Claude Code and Cursor, and the judgment to operate at the company's hardest, highest-ambiguity seats. Bonus points for experience in conversational AI, voice AI, agentic systems, or fintech/regulated financial services.

What you'll do:

  • Own a core domain end-to-end — its architecture, technical bar, and outcomes — as the most senior technical leader in the company

  • Architect and build production systems alongside your team, setting the technical standard by writing code, not from a distance

  • Hold a weekly council seat alongside the founders and partner with your Domain PM as an equal to drive measurable business outcomes

  • Steer and unblock engineers and leads across your domain, growing the team's technical capability without becoming a pure manager

  • Ship, review, and hold the line on quality and velocity across your domain's pods

  • Embed an AI-native way of working — building on frontier models and standardizing AI development tools (Claude Code, Cursor) across your domain

  • Shape the future of banking by building systems across areas like the core AI runtime, intelligence systems, AI agents, AI-first contact center, integrations, data platforms, or an AI-native consumer banking experience

About Interface AI

Interface.ai is a leading provider of agentic AI solutions, specializing in serving community banks and credit unions across the United States. The company's AI platform delivers a seamless, unified experience across voice, digital, and employee-assisted channels — all powered by a single AI brain that continuously learns and operates autonomously.

With $30M in Series A funding and already cash-flow positive, Interface.ai is trusted by hundreds of financial institutions, reaching over 10 million people in the US. The company is committed to driving automation, ensuring compliance, and enhancing customer satisfaction through pre-trained AI solutions that are easy to integrate, scale, and manage.

Mission: Democratizing financial wellness for every American — not just the ones who can afford a private banker.

Interface.ai is in a rare position as a profitable, venture-backed startup experiencing strong market demand. The company raised funds to fuel its next stage of growth, expanding both product/engineering capabilities and its go-to-market team to handle increasing demand from the financial services market.

Required skills

Agentic AI
Conversational AI
Voice AI
Large Language Models (LLMs)
AI Runtimes
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
AI Evaluation Systems
Data Platforms
Claude Code
Cursor

Other roles at Interface AI

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Job details

Salary

$335,000 - $375,000

Location

San Francisco, United States

Experience

10+ years

Company

NameInterface AI
Industrysoftware_development, ai, fintech, financial_services
Team Size140

Funding

Total raised

$30M

Last stage

Series B

Investors

Avataar Venture Partners
AAI Venture Labs

Founders

Srinivas Njay

Srinivas Njay

Co-Founder & CEO

LinkedIn
BK

Bruce Kim

Co-Founder & CTO

What happens next.

No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.

01

Confirm the fit

A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.

02

I pitch you to the company

I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.

03

A meeting lands on your calendar

If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.