Remote Startup Data Engineer Jobs in Portland, OR

Syndi is Syndio's AI platform — one shared agent experience (in-product chat, Slack, Teams) serving our product lines, built on syndi-api: an agent runtime owning orchestration, tool calling, memory, RAG, evals, and observability, live in production today. The platform is young (v1 shipped this quarter), moving fast, and designed around a clear operating model: product teams contribute domain content through APIs, evals, and knowledge — the platform owns the experience.

We're hiring a staff-level engineer to take ownership of major runtime surfaces and grow into a technical owner of the platform. This is a high-autonomy role on a small team (3–4 engineers): you'll design, ship, and operate systems end-to-end, and you'll work directly with product-team owners through the platform's contribution seams.

• Core runtime surfaces of syndi-api: the agent loop, tool execution and registry, memory, context management (Python, Postgres, Claude on Vertex, GCP).
• The eval system — offline gates and online detector/judge evals written onto production traces — and its growth as product teams adopt it.
• Production operation: observability (Datadog LLM Obs), incident response, the reliability of an agent surface real customers use.
• The platform's contribution seams: reviewing product teams' tool wrappers and evals, evolving the GET /tools registry and drift-detection contract.
• Clarifying, designing, and implementing compliance and legal requirements for Syndi.

• 5+ years building production backend systems; deep comfort with Python, relational stores, and cloud infra (we're on GCP/Kubernetes).
• You've built LLM-powered systems in production — an agent loop, tool-calling integration, RAG, or eval infrastructure — and have opinions from the scar tissue.
• You design for operability: legal compliance, tracing, evals, and kill switches are part of the feature, not afterthoughts.
• You can own a technical domain with light supervision: propose direction in writing with clear API specs, take review, ship, and carry the pager for what you shipped.
• Strong written communication — our operating model runs on design docs and PR review across team boundaries.
• Nice to have: experience being the platform side of a platform/product relationship; SSE/streaming systems; compliance-adjacent engineering (data minimization, auditability); prior Staff scope.

• ???? Competitive Compensation. For this role our salary is targeted at $205-225k USD or $180-200k CAD per year. Final offer amounts are determined by factors such as experience and expertise. 
• ????  Syndio Equity. So you can share in Syndio's success
• ????  Flexible Vacation Policy. We encourage our team to recharge when they need to (up to 20 days PTO in Canada) plus paid sick & safe time, compassion leave, and voting leave. 
• ????  Medical, Dental, Vision. Syndio pays 90% of employee premiums, and 50% for dependents.
• ????  Life Insurance & Disability. Syndio covers the full premium.
• ????Remote-first in US + Alberta; in Calgary, non-mandatory office available #LI-Remote 

• First 30 days: Focus on onboarding, mastering our core agent runtime surfaces, and shipping a small-scale contribution to understand the platform's contribution seams.
• First 60 days: Independently manage core runtime surfaces, troubleshoot complex issues, and start co-owning a consumer team's integration from API design to eval sign-off.
• First 90 days: Concretely ship a major runtime capability end-to-end (e.g., multimodal input or a new channel surface), take on-call for the platform, and co-own a consumer team's integration from API design to eval sign-off.

Below you'll find an outline of the interview plan for our Staff Software Engineer (AI Platform) position. Please note that this is what we expect the process to look like; we may ask you for supplemental information or require an additional step before making a final decision.

1. Recruiter Screen (25 min)
2. Meet the Hiring Manager (30 min) 
3. Technical Discussion - LLMs (60 min)
4. Take-Home Assignment
5. THA Exercise Review (60 min)
6. Technical Discussion - Architecture/Engineering (60 min)
7. Executive Interview (30 min)