Staff Software Engineer

About Qualitate

Qualitate is building the AI-native primary intelligence platform for enterprises, investment firms, and asset managers. We automate the entire primary research workflow, from study design and expert recruitment through AI-moderated interviews and insight synthesis – replacing weeks of manual research with hours of high-signal output.

Expert research is a broken industry dominated by legacy incumbents with expensive, manual, and slow services. Investment and corporate strategy teams spend hundreds of hours coordinating intermediaries, scheduling expert calls, and synthesizing insights across fragmented providers. The process takes weeks to produce short-lived intelligence.

Qualitate transforms this workflow by autonomously conducting expert discussions at scale using AI. Qualitate’s AI Moderator interviews thousands of experts simultaneously each month, capturing forward-looking purchasing plans, competitive displacement, and real-time ROI signals. The platform turns these interviews into quantified, time-series outputs tracking over 10,000 public and private companies, queryable instantly in natural language. Our customers include some of the world’s largest enterprises, hedge funds, PE firms, credit investors, and venture capital firms.

The Role

Join Qualitate’s engineering team as a full-stack, staff software engineer with end-to-end ownership across backend and frontend infrastructure. You’ll architect and ship commercially available APIs and data feeds, build interactive user interfaces and data visualizations in TypeScript and React, and manage infrastructure for reliability, scalability, and security. This is a high-ownership role. You’ll work directly with the founding team to define technical strategy and product roadmap, not just execute tickets.

The engineering team is small enough that your decisions shape the product. You’ll collaborate with the product and data analytics team to build what customers interact with every day, establish coding, testing, and deployment standards, and troubleshoot complex production issues. We’re looking for someone with 5+ years of experience building software who thrives in fast-moving environments where the technical surface area is wide and the team is lean.

Who This Role Is For

• 7+ years of experience building software. Ideally some of it in a startup or fast-paced environment where you owned full features end-to-end, not just individual components.
• Strong backend development skills. Experience with Node/TypeScript and frameworks like Express.js. You’ve shipped commercially available APIs and know how to build them for reliability and scale.
• Strong SQL optimization skills. You can write performant queries, optimize slow ones, and reason about data models at scale.
• Proficient with frontend technologies. Ideally React. You can build interactive user interfaces and data visualizations, not just wire up forms.
• Fluent with AI models and agentic coding tools. You use AI in your daily workflow and understand how to build with and around LLMs. This is core to how we work.
• High ownership, low ego. You work independently, communicate proactively, and don’t wait to be told what to build. You’re comfortable making architecture decisions and defending them in code review.

What Sets You Apart

• You’ve developed an MCP server.
• You've built and evaluated production AI systems.
• Experience with real-time applications and/or WebSockets.
• Previous experience at a startup or high-growth company where you helped define the engineering culture.
• Background in financial services and/or market research.

Compensation & Benefits

• Base salary: Competitive base, bonus eligibility, and early-stage equity stake.
• Equity: Meaningful early-stage grant with upside tied to company growth.
• Benefits: Health coverage, flexible PTO, paid holidays.
• Location: Full-time, in-person in New York City Mon-Weds, remote Thurs-Fri.

What to Expect Working at Qualitate

• Excellence. You’ll be held accountable to an exceptionally high bar for quality and impact.
• Direct Impact. You’ll help build an AI native product, and develop the systems and processes that define how this company scales. High velocity. Fast-paced environment in terms of growth, decision-making, and time to impact.
• High agency. Ownership over how you work, not just what you work on. We hire people we trust to figure it out.
• Shared ambition. A small, early team disrupting the multi-billion dollar market research industry with AI.
• Joy. We work hard and genuinely enjoy working together. Dedication to our work is matched only by our passion for fostering an enjoyable, collaborative work environment.