---
title: 'Software Engineer, Platform at People Culture Talent'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-platform-people-culture-talent-san-francisco-vjm9wr678zpf'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-13'
---

# Software Engineer, Platform at People Culture Talent

- **Company:** People Culture Talent
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-09-16
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-13
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/people-culture-talent/8dff7a42-31dc-4c4a-86d6-bcd477ff730f

## Job description

Note: We are recruiting on behalf of our valued client. This opportunity is for a position with their organization, not with People Culture Talent. We're excited to help connect talented professionals with this exceptional team!

## The Role

The open AI evaluation platform redefining how the world's leading AI labs measure model performance is looking for a Software Engineer, Platform to help shape the future of how the world measures artificial intelligence. They are building an AI gateway that gives developers access to multiple model providers through a unified endpoint. The product is in a private, gated launch, with additional platform capabilities—including direct model access—being built next. You’ll help build the platform infrastructure that turns their research advantage into enterprise products. This is a founding role on the developer team. You’ll work directly with the founders and early customers to define what they build and how they build it. Location: San Francisco onsite three days per week. Remote candidates will generally only be considered with a strong endorsement.

## What You’ll Do

- Build and scale hands-on backend platform services for client's AI gateway, evolving an existing prototype into a reliable, independently scalable service.
- Solve hard streaming problems. Handle SSE/streaming responses across heterogeneous providers, including partial failure recovery, mid-stream fallback, and consistent response normalization.
- Ship reliable platform infrastructure, including capabilities such as authentication, rate limiting, usage metering, and cost tracking as the gateway matures.
- Build deep observability. Instrument the platform with distributed tracing, latency breakdowns, usage tracking, and real-time dashboards so customers (and the team) can see exactly what’s happening.
- Build AI-centered platform capabilities. Integrate with client's evaluation platform and data, and collaborate with research and product teams to turn new ideas into reliable product features.
- Flex across the stack. Contribute to the backend of the company's Leaderboards and Evals products when needed, working across platform and product boundaries.

## What We’re Looking For

- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, focused on backend services, distributed systems, or developer-facing platforms.
- Strong Golang experience is required. You have built and operated meaningful backend systems in production.
- Experience designing reliable APIs, service integrations, or gateway/proxy-style systems.
- For Senior candidates: a track record of owning and delivering important backend functionality end to end.
- For Staff candidates: extensive backend/platform experience, strong technical judgment, and the ability to provide hands-on technical leadership.
- Cloud experience with GCP, AWS, Azure, or another major provider is helpful but not required.
- Comfortable working hands-on in a fast-moving environment where the product and infrastructure are still evolving.
- Able to work from our San Francisco office three days per week.

## Nice to Have

- API gateway, proxy, or multi-provider integration experience.
- Experience with streaming APIs, response normalization, or resilient distributed systems.
- Exposure to LLM APIs, model serving, AI infrastructure, or evaluation platforms.
- Cloud infrastructure experience across GCP, AWS, Azure, Kubernetes, Terraform, Postgres, or Redis.
- Experience building usage tracking, billing/metering, authentication, or developer tooling.

## Compensation Band

Their openings span more than one career level. The starting salary for this role is $200k and could range up to $350k USD, plus equity. The provided salary depends on many factors, such as work experience and transferable skills, business needs and impact, and market demands.

## Benefits

- Comprehensive health, dental, vision, and additional support programs.
- The opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI with a small, mission-driven team.
- A culture that values transparency, trust, and community impact.
- Visa sponsorship available.

About Our Client: This fast-growing startup is building technology that helps people better understand how AI models perform in real-world settings. Its open evaluation platform provides researchers, developers, and organizations with meaningful insights into model quality and performance. Through crowdsourced benchmarks and human preference data, the company helps inform important decisions about the development and use of artificial intelligence. Its evaluation tools and leaderboards have become trusted resources within the AI community. Behind the platform is a team of experienced researchers, engineers, and builders who seek truth, move quickly, and care deeply about craftsmanship and impact. They’re building a company where deep expertise meets curiosity and where the work genuinely matters.

## About People Culture Talent

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: People Culture Talent (PCT) partners with venture-backed startups to build exceptional teams through embedded talent search, people operations, and culture‑building services.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Bootstrapped)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2018
- **Founders**: Tianna Johnson and Caitlin Cooke

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Human Resources / Talent & People Operations
- **Target customers**: Venture‑backed technology startups at all stages (seed to pre‑IPO), venture capital firms, and high‑growth companies.
- **Mission**: “To build better founders and companies by creating the people, culture, and talent foundations that generational companies are made of.”

## Products & Services
PCT offers a full suite of services organized around three pillars:
- **Talent** – Retained and embedded executive search, recruiting process design, talent strategy, ATS implementation (Ashby partner), candidate experience design, and recruiting metrics.
- **Culture** – Values definition and operationalization, workplace culture development, mission/vision/framework creation, retreat/offsite planning, and employer branding.
- **People** – Organizational design & headcount planning, performance management systems, leveling & career architecture, total rewards, benefits strategy, onboarding/offboarding, payroll & HRIS implementation, manager enablement, and fractional services (marketing, customer support, L&D, Chief of Staff).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not publicly available (private, no disclosed funding).
- **Key Metric**: 220 total employees (as of early 2025); companies they have scaled average 300% annual growth.
- **Notable Investors / Partners**: Not an investment‑backed firm; clients and partners include Andreessen Horowitz (where co‑founder Caitlin Cooke advised portfolio companies), Ashby (premier implementation partner), Rippling, Lattice, Leapsome, Gem, Juicebox.
- **Growth Signals**: 5 offices globally (San Francisco, plus remote hubs across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Philippines). Currently hiring engineers (Founding Engineer, Product Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer) indicating a push to build internal platform tools. Have scaled a single client from 10 to 800 team members.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Embedded operating model** – PCT works inside the client’s tools (Slack, ATS, etc.), providing full transparency and real‑time collaboration, unlike traditional agencies.
- **Boutique by design** – The firm intentionally stays small and flat, with senior operators directly managing every engagement. No handoffs to junior consultants.
- **Proven pattern recognition** – Founders have personally scaled engineering and talent teams at Lyft (400→7,000 for IPO), GitHub (through Microsoft acquisition), Notion (20→600, $500M→$10B valuation), and ID.me (100→1,500).
- **Full‑lifecycle offering** – Covers everything from first hire to pre‑IPO people infrastructure, making it a one‑stop partner for founders.

## Strategic Focus
- Deepen the “platform” side of the business by building internal software and systems (ATS implementations, people analytics, automation).
- Expand fractional services across more functions (marketing, customer support, L&D, Chief of Staff).
- Maintain a people‑first, high‑trust culture that mirrors what they advise clients to build.
- Continue serving the venture‑backed ecosystem, from early‑stage founders to later‑stage transformations.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Described as a team of seasoned operators who are “unapologetically embedded” and committed to honest counsel. Values include accountability, collaboration, and continuous learning.
- **Work style**: Hybrid environment with a mix of remote and on‑site work. Offices in San Francisco and remote hubs across multiple countries. Some roles are fully remote, others require in‑office presence (SF).
- **Team**: Small (220 employees) but expanding; direct access to founders and partners. Engineers and non‑engineering roles alike work on high‑impact projects for top VC‑backed startups.
- **Perks**: Not publicly detailed; typical benefits for a Bay Area talent firm likely include competitive compensation, flexibility, and the opportunity to shape the people‑tech ecosystem.

## Sources
1. [People.Culture.Talent. – Homepage](https://www.peopleculturetalent.com/)
2. [Who We Are – People Culture Talent](https://www.peopleculturetalent.com/who-we-are)
3. [What We Do – People Culture Talent](https://www.peopleculturetalent.com/what-we-do)
4. [Built In – People Culture Talent Profile](https://builtin.com/company/people-culture-talent)
5. [People Culture Talent – Careers Page (Ashby)](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/people-culture-talent)

## Other roles at People Culture Talent

- [PCT | Talent Partner](https://feeny.ai/job/pct-talent-partner-people-culture-talent-united-states-ft5963cq699p) — United States
- [PCT | Technical Sourcer](https://feeny.ai/job/pct-technical-sourcer-people-culture-talent-united-states-3asakrgq1hpr) — United States
- [Talent Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/talent-engineer-people-culture-talent-united-states-9es37jcjc5fj) — United States
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- [Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-fde-people-culture-talent-san-francisco-62nn65kccn5n) — San Francisco, CA
- [Infrastructure Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/infrastructure-engineer-people-culture-talent-san-francisco-mcd3j4674w66) — San Francisco, CA
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