Staff Technologist

We're hiring a Staff Technologist to own the delivery of a key strategic initiative end-to-end. This is an individual contributor role that spans product and engineering. You shape the product direction, design the systems, ship the software, and own the outcome.

You won't write requirements and hand them to engineering. You won't architect systems and hand them to a PM. You will do both. You take an initiative from leadership, own the technical and product strategy for delivering it, and build the systems that make it real. If you're an engineering manager looking to get back to building, or a staff engineer with strong product instincts, this is that role. If you're the kind of engineer who's always shipping something on the side, you'll feel at home here.

We are building a technology organization where empowered individuals own business outcomes, not tasks. Technologists are the single-threaded owners who make that model work. You operate with high autonomy and close partnership with executive leadership. You ship incremental progress in a fast cadence: define a goal, land it, demo it, measure it.

The work is technically demanding and strategically important. You'll operate in a data-rich, regulated environment where AI is reshaping what's possible, from agentic systems that reason over business data to AI-assisted workflows that compress build cycles from months to minutes. You should be excited by that shift, not intimidated by it.

As a Staff Technologist, you will:

• Own your initiative's outcomes. Take direction from leadership on the problem to solve, then own the product and technical strategy for solving it.
• Translate goals into concrete workstreams with clear milestones and metrics that connect your work to business impact.
• Drive system design, technology selection, and architecture decisions, including AI-forward systems. Make pragmatic tradeoffs between speed and durability, holding the line on engineering quality while keeping velocity high.
• Own delivery personally. You will pull in engineers, data analysts, and other specialists as needed, but you are the one building — not managing the building of — your initiative's systems.
• Go deep on the business domain, user needs, operational workflows, and data landscape. Become the person who understands your initiative's problem space better than anyone.
• Design experiments, define success criteria, and use data to guide product and technical tradeoffs. Make progress legible to leadership as a byproduct of your methodology.

Success in this role looks like:

• First 90 days:
  • Deeply understand the business model, technology landscape, and your initiative's strategic context. Build key relationships across engineering, data, operations, and executive leadership.
  • Own a clear 3–6 month product and technical plan aligned to business objectives. Establish a delivery cadence and ship your first measurable increment.
• First 6 months:
  • You have shipped multiple increments with measurable impact on your initiative's core metrics. Progress is visible, incremental, and consistent.
  • You have established yourself as the single-threaded owner of your initiative. Leadership and operations teams trust your judgment; stakeholders are aligned.
• First year:
  • Your initiative has delivered fundamental business value you can quantify and stand behind.
  • The systems and patterns you've built are durable and well-documented. You've raised the bar for what outcome-driven Staff Technologistership looks like at Clover.

You should get in touch if:

• You have strong engineering skills and genuine product instincts. You've operated as a tech lead, staff engineer, engineering manager, or technical cofounder of an early-stage startup.
• You have shipped products or programs end-to-end — not just advised on them or managed parts of them. You've owned outcomes, not just deliverables.
• You have recent, hands-on experience with AI/LLM systems: building, shipping, or operating AI-backed features, agentic workflows, or ML-driven products. You have opinions about where the field is going.
• You are technically strong: comfortable with system design, distributed systems, data pipelines, an