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Competitive Programming Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

Clera

Platform Engineer

San Francisco, CA · On-site

$150K - $250K/yr

... competitive programming medalists, serial AI startup founders, and researchers published at top venues -- and we're looking for a Platform Engineer to own the reliability, scale, performance, and ...

Clera

Platform Engineer

San Francisco, CA · On-site

$150K - $250K/yr

... competitive programming medalists, serial AI startup founders, and researchers published at top venues - and we're looking for a Platform Engineer to own the reliability, scale, performance, and ...

Phonic

Research Engineer

San Francisco, CA · On-site

  • Medical

  • Dental

  • Vision

  • Retirement

Competitive programming or olympiad background Benefits * Top-tier compensation: in order to get the best talent, we provide salary and equity that recognize your skillset * Meals: free breakfast ...

Fuku

Member of Technical Staff Backend

San Francisco, CA · On-site

$150K - $280K/yr

  • Medical

  • PTO

... Competitive programming background. - Open-source contributions or strong GitHub projects. - Experience in AML/KYC/financial crime domains. Red Flags (Avoid) - Pure data scientists without ...

Fuku

Member of Technical Staff Backend

San Francisco, CA

$150K - $280K/yr

  • Medical

  • PTO

... 280,000 + Competitive Equity Type: Full-Time Visa Sponsorship: H-1B, O-1, OPT Priority: High ... The company is experiencing rapid growth and is expanding its engineering team to accelerate ...

Entravision Communications

Brand Manager

Burbank, CA · On-site

S. Hispanic audiences and the cultural nuances between Latin genres, while ensuring the station consistently delivers compelling, compliant, and competitive programming. Essential Functions • ...

Entravision Communications

Brand Manager

Burbank, CA · On-site

S. Hispanic audiences and the cultural nuances between Latin genres, while ensuring the station consistently delivers compelling, compliant, and competitive programming. Essential Functions • ...

interface.ai

Software Engineer

San Francisco, CA · On-site

$135K - $175K/yr

  • Medical

  • Dental

  • Vision

  • Retirement

  • PTO

Competitive programming (Codeforces, ICPC, USACO) - a plus, not a requirement * Experience in fintech or banking infrastructure Benefits 100% paid health, dental & vision care 401(k) & financial ...

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All JobsCompetitive Programming JobsCompetitive Programming Jobs in California

Competitive Programming information

See California salary details

$24.7K

$87.8K

$147K

How much do competitive programming jobs pay per year?

As of Aug 17, 2026, the average yearly pay for competitive programming in California is $87,782.00, according to ZipRecruiter salary data. Most workers in this role earn between $61,700.00 and $114,500.00 per year, depending on experience, location, and employer.

What is competitive programming?

A Competitive Programming job typically involves problem-solving, algorithm design, and coding challenges similar to those found in programming contests. These roles are common in organizations that focus on algorithm-intensive domains, such as tech giants, fintech firms, and research labs. Professionals in this field often work on optimizing code performance, developing efficient solutions, and sometimes contributing to training competitive programming teams. While it is not a conventional job title, competitive programming skills are highly valued in software engineering, algorithm development, and technical interview preparation roles.

What does a competitive programmer do?

In a professional environment, a Competitive Programmer often spends their days solving algorithmic challenges, participating in coding contests, and refining their skills through practice and learning new techniques. They may also collaborate with teammates to prepare for team-based competitions or share strategies for tackling particularly difficult problems. While much of the work is individual, there are frequent knowledge-sharing sessions and team meetings to discuss solutions and approaches. This role generally requires staying up-to-date with the latest trends in algorithms and optimizing code for both speed and efficiency, making continuous learning an integral part of the job.

What skills and qualifications are needed to thrive in competitive programming?

To thrive as a Competitive Programmer, you need advanced problem-solving abilities, strong algorithmic knowledge, and proficiency in programming languages such as C++, Java, or Python. Familiarity with online competitive programming platforms (e.g., Codeforces, LeetCode, HackerRank) and participation in recognized contests or earning relevant certifications are valuable. Resilience, time management, and the ability to work well under pressure set standout candidates apart in this role. These skills are crucial for consistently solving complex problems efficiently and performing well in high-stress, time-limited competitions.

What are the most commonly searched types of Competitive Programming jobs in California?

The most popular types of Competitive Programming jobs in California are:

What are popular job titles related to Competitive Programming jobs in California?

For Competitive Programming jobs in California, the most frequently searched job titles are:

What job categories do people searching Competitive Programming jobs in California look for?

The top searched job categories for Competitive Programming jobs in California are:

Competitive Programming jobs near you
Infographic showing various Competitive Programming job openings in California as of August 2026, with employment types broken down into 1% As Needed, 76% Full Time, 18% Part Time, 2% Temporary, and 3% Contract. Highlights an 91% Physical, 2% Hybrid, and 7% Remote job distribution, with an average salary of $87,782 per year, or $42.2 per hour.

Platform Engineer

Clera

San Francisco, CA • On-site

$150K - $250K/yr

Full-time

Posted 15 days ago

Job description

About the Role

We're a fast-growing AI/ML platform startup building infrastructure for training, evaluating, and aligning AI models within reinforcement learning environments. Our engineering team of ~15 includes competitive programming medalists, serial AI startup founders, and researchers published at top venues — and we're looking for a Platform Engineer to own the reliability, scale, performance, and developer experience of our core infrastructure.

This is a backend-architecture-heavy role with high ownership. Your work will directly determine how fast, reliable, and cost-effective our platform is to build on and run.

What You'll Do

  • Own production uptime, latency, provisioning speed, infrastructure cost, and incident response for core platform services.

  • Build and maintain AWS infrastructure using Terraform, Kubernetes/EKS, Helm, Docker, EC2, CodeBuild, ECR, S3, IAM, networking, and secrets management.

  • Design and improve backend and platform systems for scale — capacity planning, autoscaling, queueing, backpressure, cleanup jobs, retries, and rollback paths.

  • Define and improve dashboards, alerts, logs, traces, SLOs, runbooks, and on-call workflows so failures are detected, debugged, and resolved quickly.

  • Build reliable CI/CD pipelines, release automation, environment management, and deployment workflows that improve developer productivity and reduce production risk.

  • Write clean, maintainable production code to automate systems, improve backend services, and create internal developer tooling.

What We're Looking For

Required:

  • 2–4 years of experience owning production cloud infrastructure for a high-availability, user-facing platform, with accountability for uptime, performance, deployment safety, and cost.

  • Deep hands-on experience with AWS and containerized systems; strong familiarity with Terraform, Kubernetes/EKS, Docker, EC2, load balancers, networking, and secrets management.

  • Track record of building or operating CI/CD, release automation, observability, alerting, and incident response systems.

  • Strong backend engineering judgment — able to reason about service architecture, APIs, databases, async systems, queues, scaling limits, and production failure modes.

  • Ability to write production-quality code to automate infrastructure, improve backend services, and build internal tooling.

Nice to Have:

  • Experience designing systems for bursty workloads, long-running jobs, sandboxed execution, distributed workers, or high-concurrency services.

  • Background operating infrastructure for data-heavy, ML/AI, workflow, marketplace, developer-tools, or enterprise platforms.

  • Demonstrated focus on reducing cloud spend through better architecture, autoscaling, workload placement, caching, or cleanup systems.

  • Experience building internal platforms or developer tools that improve engineering productivity without hiding complexity.

We prioritize technical aptitude, ownership, and learning potential over years of experience.

Location

  • San Francisco, CA (on-site): US-based candidates must be located in San Francisco.

  • Singapore (on-site): Southeast Asia-based candidates must be located in Singapore.

  • Fully remote (contractor): Candidates based elsewhere — particularly in Europe — may be considered as fully remote independent contractors.

Visa sponsorship is available.

Compensation & Benefits

  • Salary: $150,000 – $250,000 USD annually (for full-time roles)

  • Opportunity to have significant ownership and direct impact at an early-stage, well-funded AI infrastructure company.

  • Work alongside a world-class technical team building foundational infrastructure for AI alignment and post-training data.