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Sauce is a restaurant technology platform serving the $105B US local restaurant market with commission-free delivery and proprietary delivery optimization. The company is headquartered in NYC and Tel Aviv, combining decades of restaurant tech expertise with seasoned executives across tech, sales, marketing, product, and operations.
This is a founding-level Staff Engineer role focused on AI. You'll own the full product lifecycle—from ambiguous problems to shipped solutions—building AI-native features across the Sauce platform. Your scope includes delivery optimization, restaurant operator tools, and customer-facing features powered by LLMs and AI agents.
Key responsibilities:
- Take product ideas from zero to shipped: design, build, deploy, iterate independently
- Build production AI features (agents, RAG, tool-use, structured outputs, evals) as core product
- Own the full stack: frontend, backend, data, model integration, and infrastructure
- Establish feedback loops (evals, telemetry) for reliable production AI
- Make pragmatic build-vs-buy decisions on models and tools
- Partner with product and operations to solve real restaurant problems
- Raise velocity and product standards across the team
You bring 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 3+ years shipping production full-stack applications. You have hands-on experience with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, open models)—writing code against models, not no-code tools. You're fluent in TypeScript/Python and modern web stacks. You have a public builder's portfolio: open-source projects, side projects, demos, or products with real users. You're AI-first by default, reaching for models to solve problems and staying current with the ecosystem. You're product-minded, caring about outcomes and user impact, not just implementation. You compress weeks into days, shipping and iterating rapidly. You're comfortable with ambiguity and thrive in small, fast-moving teams.
Nice-to-have: meaningful open-source projects with real adoption, solo-launched AI apps with traction, experience with agent/eval frameworks and vector stores, history of being early in emerging spaces, contributions to leading AI or developer-tool projects, background in marketplaces, logistics, delivery, or restaurant/local-commerce tech.
Compensation includes equity, company-sponsored health/dental/vision/mental health insurance, paid parental leave, and flexible work environment.
