Harper (YC W25) · 9 hours ago
Senior Member of Technical Staff
San Francisco, CA
Full-time
Onsite
Senior Level
$160K/yr - $230K/yr
5+ years expHarper is a company revolutionizing the professional services industry by leveraging AI to transform how businesses operate. The Senior Member of Technical Staff will design and architect AI-native applications, lead the development of autonomous AI agents, and set technical standards for building scalable systems.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)FinTechInsurance
Responsibilities
Design and architect AI-native applications that fundamentally rethink how business logic operates—moving beyond Web 2.0 patterns to LLM-first, multi-modal experiences
Own critical systems end-to-end: from architecture decisions to production deployment, monitoring, and iteration
Build distributed, fault-tolerant infrastructure using Temporal.io, Kafka, Flink, and other streaming/orchestration platforms that handle millions of events daily
Lead the development of fully autonomous AI agents that take real-world actions - quoting policies, managing workflows, and handling customer interactions
Set technical standards for how we build, deploy, and scale AI systems—establishing patterns that other engineers will follow
Bridge AI research and engineering - translating novel research into production-grade systems and providing feedback loops that improve model performance
Drive business-process optimization - identify where changing business operations unlocks 10x improvements in data quality, agent performance, or system scalability
Mentor and elevate junior engineers, establishing engineering culture and raising the bar for technical excellence
Make high-stakes technical decisions under uncertainty - choosing between build vs. buy, monolith vs. microservices, sync vs. async, with real business consequences
Qualification
Required
5+ years shipping production systems in high-growth startups (strong preference for 0→1 experience)
Deep expertise building and scaling LLM-powered applications - RAG architectures, prompt engineering, context management, agent orchestration
Experience architecting and deploying distributed systems using message queues (Kafka, SQS), workflow orchestration (Temporal, Airflow), and stream processing (Flink, Spark)
Experience building full-stack applications using Python backend services (FastAPI, async patterns) + React.js frontends that handle complex state
Experience building in AWS with Lambda, ECS/EKS, S3, RDS, DynamoDB at scale
Experience designing for failure, reason about consistency vs. availability tradeoffs, and architect for 100x growth
Implemented distributed tracing and APM infrastructure using OpenTelemetry and Datadog
Technical leadership, mentoring engineers, led technical initiatives, or driven architectural decisions with measurable business impact
Been a previous founder, early startup employee, or demonstrated ability to own entire product areas
Preferred
Experience fine-tuning LLMs, optimizing inference costs, or building custom ML pipelines
Built CDC pipelines (Debezium, Kafka Connect) for real-time data synchronization
Shipped data-intensive applications processing millions of records daily
Designed and implemented internal developer platforms or tooling
Led incident response and built reliable on-call practices
Benefits
Competitive base + equity
Lunch / Dinner covered
Medical, dental, vision
Company
Harper (YC W25)
Harper is a commercial E&S insurance brokerage.
2-10 employees
Funding
Current Stage
Early StageTotal Funding
$0.5MKey Investors
Y Combinator
2025-03-12Pre Seed· $0.5M
Company data provided by crunchbase