Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Unstructured is defining the standard for enterprise data transformation in the age of LLMs and generative AI. They are seeking Staff and Principal Software Engineers to define the architectural foundation for processing and transforming unstructured data for LLM applications, ensuring systems are performant and resilient.
Responsibilities
- Define and evolve the end-to-end architecture for Unstructured’s data transformation and retrieval platform
- Build and scale distributed systems that process massive volumes of unstructured data across diverse formats and sources
- Serve as the company-wide authority on Kubernetes orchestration, cluster design, performance tuning, and reliability
- Lead Python architecture and best practices—ensuring performance, modularity, and maintainability across services
- Design and optimize Postgres schemas, queries, and indexing strategies to support large-scale metadata and retrieval pipelines
- Mentor senior engineers through design reviews and code guidance, raising the bar for technical excellence across the org
- Partner with the infrastructure and product teams to translate research prototypes into production-grade systems
- Evaluate emerging technologies and open-source tools in LLM infrastructure, retrieval, and orchestration—deciding where and how to integrate them
Skills
- Have 10+ years of software engineering experience with a focus on distributed systems, infrastructure, or data architecture
- Are a Python expert—capable of building frameworks and performance-critical services from scratch
- Have deep Kubernetes expertise; you can design, deploy, and debug at scale and could teach others how to productionize it securely
- Are fluent in Postgres—you understand query planning, partitioning, and tuning for high-throughput environments
- Are obsessed with clean, scalable architecture and can lead design reviews that shape how entire systems evolve
- Have experience in high-performance data or AI/ML systems—especially those involving retrieval pipelines, embeddings, or hybrid workloads
- Thrive in fast-moving, ambiguous environments where technical depth and judgment matter more than process
- Experience building or scaling LLM-powered or RAG systems in production
- Familiarity with open-source orchestration frameworks, vector databases, or hybrid cloud infrastructure
- Contributions to open-source projects in Python, Kubernetes, or distributed systems
Benefits
- Company offsites
- Best-in-tech swag
- The tools you need to do your best work, wherever you're based
- Medical, dental, and vision coverage effective the 1st of the month following your start date
- Life and disability insurance
- Unlimited PTO
- Flexible parental leave
- A 401(k) with company match
- Equity
- $500 work from home stipend
- $70/month internet reimbursement
- Team/company offsites throughout the year
Company Overview
Unstructured is the data infrastructure company solving the most critical bottleneck in enterprise AI: making unstructured data accessible to AI applications. It was founded in 2022, and is headquartered in Rocklin, California, USA, with a workforce of 51-200 employees. Its website is https://unstructured.io.Company H1B Sponsorship
Unstructured has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 1 in 2024. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role.