Senior Software Engineer at Cypris in New York City

About Cypris

Cypris is the vertical AI platform for corporate R&D and innovation teams. We centralize scientific papers, patents, market news, and company intelligence into a single platform with over 1B global data points.

We're building AI Agents tailored to R&D workflows, powered by the latest models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and others. With Cypris, teams can manage projects, automate research workflows, and track markets, competitors, and technologies to accelerate product development and R&D strategy. Today, leading mid-size to Fortune 100 companies in aerospace, genomics, cancer research, and autonomous systems rely on Cypris to innovate faster and with more clarity. Customers include the US Airforce, NASA, J&J, Yamaha and more.

About The Role

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer with a passion for building customer centric products to join our engineering team. You'll spend significant time architecting and building the core data infrastructure that powers our AI-driven platform, the services that present the data, and UI that our customers touch and our AI Agents leverage to deliver value.

This is a hands-on engineering role. You'll have real ownership in the domain you work in, but you'll exercise it on a small, flat team where everyone contributes everywhere. Influence here is earned through what you ship and how well you bring others along. It's a chance to shape and influence the technical foundation of a platform transforming how R&D teams discover and leverage global innovation data.

Responsibilites

• Design and build scalable customer centric products from data to presentation.
• Systems you develop must be production-grade: robust error handling, monitoring, and performance optimization.
• Optimize storage and retrieval patterns across relational and document/search systems, tuned for query performance and cost.
• Create data access layers and APIs that integrate data infrastructure cleanly with application services.
• Take data/product domain features from 0-to-1; from ingestion through to user-facing functionality.
• Take proactive action on alerts, debug to root cause, and own the fix and remediation steps when issues surface.
• Work directly with the CTO and the rest of the team to establish engineering practices, maintain clear documentation, and share knowledge across the team.
• Anchor your work to customer impact and success first. Identify and adapt when process or technical perfectionism is costing more than it's returning for the customer.
• Ship small, ship often, and let improvements compound over time.

Requirements

• 5–8 years of software engineering experience with significant exposure to data-intensive applications, streaming and batch, and distributed systems at scale. You’ve done this before.
• Strong programming expertise in Python, building production applications and data processing systems. You are opinionated about what Python code looks like.
• Hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP). You can speak fluently about core cloud concepts.
• Solid data modeling for both SQL and NoSQL, with experience in PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch.
• Fluency with AI-assisted development (Claude Code, Codex, or equivalent) and a demonstrated track record of using it to ship faster. This is a hard requirement; it's how we work.
• Experience building for non-technical or B2B customers, or clearly demonstrated comfort translating technical work into customer and market language. Our product is shaped by the market as much as by engineering precision, and you're comfortable holding both and speaking to your work in front of end customers.
• Prior experience on a small (<15-person), flat team where decisions get made without formal hierarchy. This should energize you, not disorient you.
• Adapts to the systems and standards already in place, then changes them from the inside. You take the time to understand why something is built the way it is before pushing to replace it, you meet a team's existing norms rather than expecting others to adopt yours, you earn broader change through credibility and incremental influence over time.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: version control, code review, testing, CI/CD, infrastructure as code.
• Proven track record owning production systems from design through deployment, monitoring, and iteration.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to debug complex data and system issues to their root cause.
• Direct, transparent communicator who raises disagreement in the open, with the people involved, and who collaborates well cross-functionally.
• Can thrive in a fully remote culture when given the autonomy to drive projects forward. Comfortable with long stretches of deep, independent focus work. Proactive enough to stay energized and connected with peers.

Nice to Have

• Proficiency with Apache Airflow / Google Cloud Composer.
• Have built an MCP server or agentic data access layer as a product for real customers.
• Background building data platforms for GenAI/LLM applications, including vector databases and embedding pipelines.
• Knowledge of data governance, lineage, and quality frameworks.
• Familiarity with scientific/technical data sources (patents, research papers, regulatory filings). Maybe you have a patent or have published a research paper.
• Search and information retrieval systems at scale.

How We Work (Please read before applying)

Cypris’ engineering team is less than 10 people and deliberately flat. Everyone can, and does, contribute anywhere across the platform. While the CTO holds the ultimate decision on consequential technical matters, decisions are encouraged to be made through collaboration rather than by chain of command. Your recognition, scope, influence, and compensation grow with real-world impact. If you've only worked in large orgs with intricate formal authority structures, this will feel different. We're looking for someone who's genuinely energized by that.

We try to move fast and may make pragmatic, business-driven decisions in areas you may consider your expertise. We need someone who treats that as normal, not as a compromise of a technical vision. When you, inevitably, disagree with a decision, we expect you to take that disagreement straight to the people involved, in the open for resolution. In any event, we commit once a call is made.

High-trust roles can involve a lot of deep, heads-down, independent building and Cypris is no different. The people who will do best are genuinely comfortable working autonomously but also take the initiative to stay connected with their teammates and grounded in their personal lives. If you know you need constant interaction, immediate responses, or an always-in-a-room environment to do your best work, this specific seat may not be the right fit.

Why Join Us

• Build the platform at the intersection of hard R&D science and AI.
• Tackle complex challenges in data integration, scalability, and cost optimization.
• Own a domain 0-to-1 on a team where impact is earned, valued, and celebrated.
• Work for an early-stage startup with an extremely positive outlook.