---
title: 'Senior Software Engineer at Variance'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-variance-san-francisco-vd07ecwmbygz'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-01'
---

# Senior Software Engineer at Variance

- **Company:** Variance
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $200k–$300k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2025-10-01
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-01
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/intrinsic-safety/f5e064fb-83a3-4c0c-8051-a635828dee3b

## Job description

## Role

At Variance, we are teaching machines to make the hardest judgement calls at scale. That means building AI agents for the high-precision gray-area of risk investigations, fraud, and identity reviews.

We’re a small, talent-dense team in San Francisco tackling problems that touch billions of events and entities. Our customers include Fortune 500 companies and global marketplaces, and we’re scaling systems that free millions of hours of human effort.

We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer who wants to own product and technical decisions end-to-end. You’ll work directly with the founders to build and scale AI-powered systems where precision, speed, and trust matter deeply.

You’re a fit if you:

- Have 4+ years of professional software engineering experience or equivalent
- Care deeply about craftsmanship and have strong opinions about product quality, system design, and code quality
- Thrive in high-ownership environments and want to drive projects end-to-end, from backend architecture to polished UI to production
- Have strong fundamentals and can ramp quickly in our stack: React/Next.js, TypeScript, MySQL, and ClickHouse
- Are comfortable making pragmatic technical tradeoffs in ambiguous, fast-moving environments
- Have experience building reliable systems at scale and debugging issues in production
- Enjoy collaborating closely with product, design, and leadership to turn fuzzy problems into shipped systems
- Raise the bar for the team through technical leadership, mentorship, and high standards

## What you’ll do

- Own product features and systems end-to-end, from architecture and implementation to launch and iteration
- Lead technical decisions across the stack, balancing speed, quality, maintainability, and scale
- Build AI-powered interfaces and decision systems that operate in real time with high precision and user trust
- Work directly with the founders on frontier problems in fraud, abuse, and risk
- Scale our product into new industries and workflows through rapid pilots, live demos, and fast feedback loops
- Improve engineering velocity by shaping internal tools, patterns, and standards
- Help define the technical foundation of the company as we grow

Our culture We believe in ownership, urgency, and craft. We enjoy spirited debate, wild ideas, and building things we're proud of. We're fully in-person in San Francisco.

## What we offer

- Competitive salary and meaningful equity
- Health care: we offer platinum-level medical, dental, and vision insurance
- Unlimited PTO, sick leave, and parental leave
- Up to $100 in reimbursement for personal health & wellness expenses each month
- 401(k) plan

## About Variance

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Variance builds AI agents that automate complex risk investigations, such as sanctions screening and fraud review, for Fortune 500s and regulated financial institutions.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A, $21.5M raised in March 2026)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Michael Lin and Karine Mellata

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Enterprise AI, Compliance Technology, Cybersecurity, Risk Management
- **Target customers**: Fortune 500 companies, marketplaces, and regulated financial services (B2B, Enterprise)
- **Mission or purpose statement**: "To build technology that helps good prevail in highly adversarial environments." [variance.com](https://www.variance.com/company)

## Products & Services
- **Variance AI Agents**: A suite of AI agents designed to automate the full investigative workflow for compliance and risk teams. Agents can handle tasks from Level 1 to Level 3 reviews, including sanctions screening, fraud review, and identity verification. They extract insights from messy data (scanned documents, images, websites) and provide a complete, auditable evidence trail for every decision. [variance.com](https://www.variance.com/)

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding of $24.6M ($3.1M Seed in 2024 + $21.5M Series A in March 2026). [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/variance)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator (Winter 2023 batch), with the Series A led by a prominent venture firm (specific lead investor not named in the provided search results, but the round was reported by Axios and Business Wire).
- **Growth Signals**: Raised a $21.5M Series A in March 2026, signaling strong market traction. The company claims its agents can reduce investigative cycles by 10x and collect 90% of evidence for each case. Trusted by Fortune 500s.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Auditability & Explainability**: Unlike many "black box" AI systems, Variance is "built for regulators and auditors." Every decision comes with a complete, cited evidence trail, making it defensible in a highly regulated environment.
- **Adversarial Focus**: The company is explicitly designed for "highly adversarial environments" where threats evolve constantly, giving it a sharper focus than general-purpose automation tools.
- **Speed to Production**: The company emphasizes a culture of velocity, measuring timelines from prototype to production in "days, not months," allowing them to adapt quickly to new fraud patterns.

## Strategic Focus
- **Deepening Enterprise Sales**: The company is actively hiring Enterprise Account Executives and Sales Engineers, indicating a push to expand its customer base among large, regulated institutions.
- **Product Development**: Open roles for Research Engineers (Evals, Judgment Systems) and Senior Software Engineers suggest a continued focus on improving the accuracy, reliability, and reasoning capabilities of their AI agents.
- **Scaling the Team**: With a Series A close in early 2026, the company is in a clear growth phase, expanding its engineering and go-to-market teams from a small base (12-person team per YC profile).

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & Values**: The company emphasizes a culture of **Ownership** (every employee is an owner from day one), **Velocity** (fast iteration), **Craftsmanship** (deep care and intentionality in building), and **Impact** (building systems trusted for mission-critical decisions). [variance.com](https://www.variance.com/company)
- **Work Policy**: In-person in San Francisco.
- **Compensation & Perks**: Offers competitive salary and meaningful equity. Benefits include platinum-tier medical/dental/vision insurance, a 401(k) program, unlimited PTO/sick leave/parental leave, daily catered lunches and dinners, a monthly wellness stipend, commuter benefits, and company events. [variance.com](https://www.variance.com/careers)
- **Engineering Culture**: A high-agency environment where engineers own end-to-end responsibility for systems. The work is technically challenging, involving building AI that operates in real-time against sophisticated adversaries.

## Sources
1. [variance.com](https://www.variance.com/)
2. [variance.com/company](https://www.variance.com/company)
3. [variance.com/careers](https://www.variance.com/careers)
4. [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/variance)

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