Posted 4 months ago

Senior Engineer

San FranciscoRemoteFull-time

AI Summary

A Support Engineer who acts as a bridge between customers, engineering, and product, ensuring smooth onboarding, reliable integrations, and scalable support operations.

About this role

About Zuma

Zuma is pioneering the future of agentic AI and our focus is to transform the rental market experience for consumers and property manager alike. Our innovative platform is engineered from the ground up to boost operations efficiency and enhance support capabilities for property management business across the US and Canada, a ~$200B market.

Off the back of our Series-A in early 2024, Zuma is scaling rapidly. Achieving our vision requires a team of passionate, innovative individuals eager to leverage technology to redefine customer-business interactions. We're on the hunt for exceptional talent ready to join our mission and contribute to building a groundbreaking technology that reshapes how businesses engage with customers.

Zuma has raised over $17M in funding to date and has support from world-renowned investors, including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Y Combinator, King River, Range Ventures, and distinguished angel investors like YC’s former COO, Qasar Younis.

The Role

As a Support Engineer at Zuma, you’ll be a bridge between our customers, engineering team, and product vision. You’ll ensure new customers onboard smoothly, integrations run reliably, and support operations scale as we grow. This is a hands-on role for someone who loves problem-solving, can dive into APIs and databases, and takes pride in clear documentation and communication. You’ll help property managers succeed with our AI platform while also driving continuous improvements in our internal tools and processes.

Why This Could Be Your Dream Role

You want to work at a company where customers feel your impact every day

You'll have autonomy to design and implement innovative technical solutions

Your work will directly impact thousands of apartment communities and millions of renters

You'll receive significant equity in a venture-backed company with strong traction

As we scale, your role and influence will grow with the company

Why You Might Want to Think Twice

This is a demanding role that will often require extended hours and deep commitment

As a founding team member, you'll need to wear multiple hats and step outside your comfort zone

You'll need to make thoughtful tradeoffs between innovation and immediate needs

You'll interact directly with customers to understand their needs and occasionally travel to their offices

We're a startup - priorities can shift rapidly as we respond to market opportunities and customer needs

If you're not comfortable getting your hands dirty with legacy code or speaking directly with customers, this isn't the job for you

Responsibilities

Lead critical system rewrites to transform our architecture into a highly scalable, resilient foundation

Own the design and performance optimization of our data storage systems, ensuring they scale with customer and AI demands

Build and evolve our deployment pipelines, enabling reliable, automated releases for AI-first products

Set up and manage modern cloud infrastructure from scratch, leveraging Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to ensure consistency, security, and scalability

Establish engineering best practices, including observability, incident response processes, and system hardening for an AI-first platform

Drive robust analytics and monitoring to track performance, reliability, and the effectiveness of our AI solutions

Mentor engineers and elevate the team's capabilities across infrastructure, scalability, and AI product development

Your Experience Looks Like

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field

3+ years of experience building production-grade software systems, with a focus on scalability, performance, and reliability

Proven expertise in backend development with Node.js, including API design, system architecture, and cloud-based services

Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or similar) and deploying production systems using Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform, Pulumi)

Hands-on experience with database design, performance tuning, and scaling high-throughput data systems

Familiarity with building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and modern DevOps practices

Strong communication skills and ability to work effectively in a distributed, fast-paced environment

Comfortable operating in early-stage, high-ownership environments with evolving requirements

Bonus: Experience with React and TypeScript on the frontend, though this role leans backend/infrastructure

Bonus: Exposure to LLM-based systems, AI infrastructure, or agentic AI workflows

Guiding Principles

Customer‑First Outcomes

Every commit should trace back to resident or operator value. Whether it’s a new feature, infra investment, or AI capability, if it doesn’t solve a real problem, it doesn’t ship.

Bias for Simplicity

We favor composable primitives over clever abstractions. Open standards, clean APIs, and clear contracts win over custom complexity, even if the custom version is cooler.

Quality Is a Gate, Not an After‑Thought

Quality is built-in from day one. Our definition of done includes: test coverage, performance checks, basic observability, and internal docs. Shipping fast doesn’t mean skipping craftsmanship.

Data‑Driven Choices

We use data to guide, not paralyze, our decision-making. We track leading indicators (cycle time, defect rate, NPS) and lagging signals (retention, revenue impact). We keep instrumentation lightweight but meaningful signal over spreadsheet.

Transparency & Written Culture

Good ideas don’t expire in Zoom. We operate in public inside the company, TDDs, PR reviews, and Linear tickets tell the story. This keeps us async-friendly, auditable, and aligned across time zones and functions.