Software Engineer, Systems

Founded in Silicon Valley in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz (aka a16z) is a venture capital firm that backs bold entrepreneurs building the future through technology. We are stage agnostic. We invest in seed to venture to growth-stage technology companies, across AI, bio + healthcare, consumer, crypto, enterprise, fintech, games, and companies building toward American dynamism. a16z has $100B+ under management across multiple funds. We've established a team that is defined by respect for the entrepreneur and the company-building process; we know what it's like to be in the founder's shoes. We've invested in companies like Anduril, Airbnb, Coinbase, Cursor, Databricks, Deel, Figma, GitHub, Roblox, SpaceX, and Stripe. Our team is at the forefront of new technology, helping founders and their companies impact and change the world.

The Role

You will join the Applied Software Group (ASG), a team of experienced individual contributors building internal software tools for the firm's investing and operations teams. As a software engineer optimizing developer experience, you will own, improve and help with the adoption of our internal developer platform as well as the team's wider product portfolio. You will work on and own the infrastructure and tooling that the team and its partners are building with. The Applied Software Group operates in the mode of an internal startup. We own a tight feedback loop with our users and take on requests from all corners of the firm. In this role, your users are your fellow colleagues — you'll understand their pain points, eliminate friction from their daily workflows, and build the platform and tools that lets everyone build more, faster, and with confidence. While doing so, you will closely work together with your fellow engineers and other teams throughout the firm. This role requires an in-office presence 2-3 days a week in our San Francisco, CA office.

To join our team, you should be excited to:

• Contribute to and help improve the our developer platform, associated with a diverse set of applications
• Continuously work with your fellow colleagues to understand, review and assist their diverse use-cases for projects
• Build and maintain shared tooling, templates, and internal libraries that accelerate development across the firm's products
• Support observability, monitoring, and alerting so engineers can self-serve when things break in production
• Collaborate with the Cybersecurity team to help ensure developer workflows meet security and compliance requirements
• Write and maintain developer documentation, onboarding guides, and runbooks that actually get used
• Ship improvements iteratively, incorporating feedback from your users to continuously improve the developer experience
• Take ownership of assigned projects and services, from development through production support, with increasing autonomy over time
• Write clear, well-structured, and maintainable code
• Bring positive energy in every interaction with the team and foster inclusive collaboration
• Stay curious about new tools, technologies, and approaches relevant to infrastructure and developer productivity
• Learn the inner workings of VC and work closely with the investing partnership

Minimum Qualifications

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Proficiency in Python 3, Rust or similar backend languages and willingness to learn new technologies
• Track record of defining and shipping developer platforms or internal tooling that measurably improved engineering velocity
• Excitement to work directly with a diverse user group with varying technical backgrounds
• Experience deploying services on at least one major cloud platform (GCP, AWS, or Azure)
• Experience with containerized services (Docker); experience with Kubernetes is a plus
• Exposure to CI/CD systems (GitHub Actions, Cloud Build, CircleCI, or similar)
• Experience working with production SQL databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL); NoSQL experience (e.g., Elasticsearch) is a plus
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code concepts (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar) is a plus
• Experience working in environments that value rapid iteration, code quality, and operational excellence
• Strong problem-solving skills and solid technical fundamentals with a get-it-done mentality
• Low ego, high empathy, and the capacity to collaborate effectively with diverse teams

This role is open at the Software Engineer (Partner 16) and Senior Software Engineer (Partner 18) levels. The anticipated salary range for this role is between: Software Engineer (Partner 16): $269,000 - $314,000; Senior Software Engineer (Partner 18): $301,000 - $352,000. Final compensation will be determined based on a candidate's overall experience, technical depth, and interview performance. This role is eligible to participate in the a16z Carry program and various discretionary bonus programs as well as benefit and perquisite plans including health, dental, vision, disability, life insurance, 401K plan, vacation, and sick leave.

a16z culture

• We do only first class business and only in a first class way
• We take a long view of relationships, because we are in the relationship business
• We believe in the future and bet the firm that way
• We are all different, we recognize that, and we win
• We celebrate the good times
• We do it for the team
• We play to win