Staff Full Stack Engineer

A little about us… Knit is the AI-native consumer research platform helping brands automate and accelerate primary research. With our Researcher-Driven AI, we’ve condensed the entire quant + qual research process from weeks into days (sometimes hours!) for 50+ enterprise brands — including Amazon, T-Mobile, Mars, NASCAR, and more. We’re on a mission to scale and democratize world-class research. From survey generation to stakeholder-ready reports, our platform is redefining how insights teams operate — and we need your help to push the limits of what’s possible. Overview We’re continuing to build out our NYC engineering team and are looking for exceptional builders who are resourceful, deeply technical, and thrive in high-ownership environments. As an early member of the team, you’ll play a key role in shaping the core of our platform and contributing to a team that will scale to 20+ engineers over the next 18 months. You’ll build and orchestrate AI agents, explore new UX paradigms, and work on some of the hardest problems in applied AI with meaningful ownership across the stack. Responsibilities | What you will own... Primary responsibilities of this role: • Own 0→1 and 1→N features across the stack, from design docs to building high-throughput data pipelines and scalable FastAPI services. • Architect and own the core agent orchestration engine, designing complex, multi‑agent LLM workflows (routing, tool‑use, memory, evaluation) with deterministic fallbacks, guardrails, and auditable actions required by enterprise users. • Build AI‑native, human‑in‑the‑loop UIs. Craft React/Next.js interfaces that let users collaborate safely with agents, with transparency and explainability by design. • Develop the "factory for the factory". Build our experimentation platform: CI/CD for prompts and agents, offline/online evals, drift detection, safety layers, and rollout controls. • Ship fast, safely. You’ll instrument everything for reliability, write concise design docs, add robust tests, and build dashboards and alerts for features you launch. • Partner cross‑functionally with Product, AI, Design, CS; talk to customers and SMEs, and turn ambiguous problems into shipped product. • Obsess over performance, optimizing for latency across the system: caching, model selection, distillation, batching, vector search, and infrastructure efficiency (GPU/CPU). • Operate what you build. This includes on‑call ownership, leading incident response, and driving learning through blameless postmortems. • Level-up the team around you. Mentor and collaborate with other engineers to help make the entire team better. This role is for you if... • You’re a 0 → 1 builder who thrives in ambiguity and has shipped products from scratch at a startup or in a hyper-growth phase. You've seen both - early-stage hustle and later-stage scale and know how to build for it. • You’re a systems thinker with deep technical chops: you design clear architectures and write clean, tested Python and TypeScript. • You think like an owner: you spot problems, propose solutions, and build them without waiting for perfect specs. Your impact is measured in business outcomes. • You use AI as leverage. Tools like Cursor, Copilot, or Claude Code are integral to your workflow, helping you ship faster while maintaining a high standard for correctness. • You believe speed and quality aren’t opposites and can articulate the tradeoffs you make. • You communicate crisply. You share your ideas effectively and thrive in tight feedback loops with product, design, and customers. • You’ve got grit: hard problems energize you, context switching doesn’t scare you, and you’re comfortable deleting code. Our Stack • Frontend: React, Next.js • Backend: Python, FastAPI • Data/ML: MongoDB