Software Engineer

A few honest things up top

• This is a full-time hybrid role and we work long hours
• Open to exceptional global talent
• We're a lean team and you'll work directly with the founder
• You're not expecting fancy offices
• You want to bet on upside over market salaries
• This is for builders who thrive on ownership and big swings only

About Cenara

Cenara is building the intelligence layer for how revenue decisions get made. We sit above conversations, systems, and human judgment to transform raw, unstructured signals into clear, high-leverage decisions: what matters, what's at risk, and what to do next. Our goal is to eliminate reactive selling and replace it with systems that reason, learn, and compound insight over time. For engineers, this is a chance to work on real-world reasoning systems, agentic workflows, and human-AI collaboration at the sharp edge of business impact, where every model decision directly shapes outcomes.

Overview

We are looking for a product-minded engineer who can independently own features and services from design through production. You will work across frontend, backend, AI systems, databases, integrations, and infrastructure. You should be able to design moderately scoped systems, reason clearly about trade-offs, and write maintainable code that can evolve as the product changes.

You will use AI coding tools heavily, but judgment remains the job. You are responsible for every design decision and every line you ship.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own end-to-end: Take features from product understanding and low-level design through implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, and ongoing operation with limited supervision.
• Design with judgment: Apply SOLID principles and established design patterns where they improve the system, not by default. Define entities, relationships, interfaces, and abstractions appropriate to the problem.
• Build for change: Write modular, extensible code that can accommodate likely requirements without major rewrites. Handle concurrency, state, and thread safety where relevant.
• Ensure correctness: Deliver working systems with critical flows tested end to end. Handle edge cases deliberately, debug systematically, and take ownership of production failures.
• Contribute to system design: Design components, APIs, data models, and storage, caching, and queuing approaches while reasoning about scale, reliability, and failure modes.
• Build AI systems: Develop reliable LLM and agentic workflows across retrieval, tool use, orchestration, memory, evaluation, and human-in-the-loop actions.
• Use AI with judgment: Treat AI-assisted development as a multiplier. Review outputs critically, reject incorrect assumptions and fabricated APIs, and improve weak architecture rather than shipping it faster.
• Raise the quality bar: Improve the systems you touch through thoughtful reviews, better abstractions, stronger testing, and clear technical decisions.

What we're looking for:

• 3-7 years of hands-on software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
• Strong full-stack fundamentals across frontend applications, backend APIs, databases, and cloud infrastructure.
• A track record of independently delivering significant features or services end to end.
• Strong low-level design and the ability to design moderately scoped systems.
• Sound understanding of software design principles, common design patterns, testing, debugging, and reliability.
• Experience building LLM-powered products, agentic systems, RAG pipelines, or tool-calling workflows.
• Comfortable making pragmatic trade-offs and unblocking yourself without detailed specifications.
• Product-minded, low-ego, and accountable for outcomes, not just assigned code.