Staff and Principal Software Engineers own architecture and production systems across CloudZero’s engineering teams, driving scalable product capabilities, high-impact technical decisions, and engineering growth.
Staff Product Software Engineer
📜 Description
- Direct AI coding agents to build production systems while maintaining sound system design, ownership, and real-world behavior.
- Set technical direction across system boundaries, data models, ownership, and operational expectations.
- Decide what to build and make trade-offs among speed, reliability, complexity, and extensibility.
- Co-own product direction with design and research, shaping architecture early.
- Own critical outcomes end to end, from framing through deployment.
- Mentor engineers in using AI tools rigorously and prevent recurring design mistakes.
🛠️ Requirements
- 8+ years building and shipping production software.
- Multiple non-trivial projects where you owned technical direction and execution end to end.
- High-stakes technical decisions that materially affected a system or product.
- Fluency with AI coding tools, used to ship real functionality in production or substantial side projects.
- Strong technical depth (system design, distributed systems, security, infrastructure) or strong product intuition (user empathy, prioritization, UX taste), ideally both.
- Personal responsibility for a measurable real-world success — a product at 100k+ users or 1M+ monthly actives, a system serving millions of requests a day, or an open-source project with 10k+ stars or meaningful adoption.
Full job description
You'll set technical direction for how products get built at Luma, directing AI coding agents to ship production systems fast while making the disciplined calls on scope, structure, and trade-offs. This is a senior role where judgment, not typing, is the constraint.
With AI making implementation cheap, weak decisions compound faster, so the job is deciding what to build, what not to, and where code should exist at all. It's for a technical leader with deep system-design judgment and real product intuition who is genuinely world-class at directing AI agents. If you measure your impact by lines of code written, this isn't framed for you.
What You'll Own
Direct AI coding agents to build production systems quickly, holding the line on system design, ownership, and real-world behavior.
Decide what to build and what not to build as implementation costs drop.
Set technical direction across engineering: system boundaries, data models, ownership, and operational expectations.
Co-own product direction with design and research.
Make and stand behind hard trade-offs between speed, reliability, complexity, and extensibility.
Shape architecture early, and own critical outcomes end to end from framing to deployment.
Mentor engineers on using AI tools without lowering rigor, and eliminate recurring classes of design mistakes.
First 90 Days
One way the first 90 could unfold.
Days 1–30 — Immerse & Diagnose: Learn the systems and product, and find where complexity or ambiguity is slowing the team.
Days 30–60 — Ship & Validate: Own a critical outcome end to end and set technical direction on a meaningful surface.
Days 60–90 — Scale & Systemize: Establish the standards and workflows that let small teams ship with outsized impact.
What You Bring
8+ years building and shipping production software.
Multiple non-trivial projects where you owned technical direction and execution end to end.
High-stakes technical decisions that materially affected a system or product.
Fluency with AI coding tools, used to ship real functionality in production or substantial side projects.
Strong technical depth (system design, distributed systems, security, infrastructure) or strong product intuition (user empathy, prioritization, UX taste), ideally both.
Nice to Have
Personal responsibility for a measurable real-world success — a product at 100k+ users or 1M+ monthly actives, a system serving millions of requests a day, or an open-source project with 10k+ stars or meaningful adoption.
About Luma: Luma's mission is to build unified general intelligence that can generate, understand, and operate in the physical world. We believe multimodality is critical for intelligence — the next step beyond language models comes from vision. Luma is an equal opportunity employer.
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