Software Engineer, Platform (Partner 16, Partner 18)

You will join the Applied Software Group at a16z crypto, a team of experienced software engineers building internal tools for the firm's investing and operations teams. As a software engineer optimizing developer experience, you will own and improve the internal developer platform and wider product portfolio, working on infrastructure and tooling that power the team's partners' builds. Your users are your colleagues across the firm; you will understand their pain points, eliminate friction from their workflows, and ship tooling that lets everyone build faster and with confidence.

What you'll do

• Contribute to and help improve the developer platform, which serves a diverse set of applications across the firm
• Work continuously with colleagues to understand, review, and assist their diverse use-cases for projects
• Build and maintain shared tooling, templates, and internal libraries that accelerate development
• Support observability, monitoring, and alerting so engineers can self-serve when things break in production
• Collaborate with the Cybersecurity team to 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 to 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 venture capital and work closely with the investing partnership

What you bring

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Proficiency in Python 3, Rust, or similar backend languages, and willingness to learn new technologies
• A 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)
• Exposure to CI/CD systems such as GitHub Actions, Cloud Build, or CircleCI
• Experience working with production SQL databases (e.g. PostgreSQL, MySQL)
• 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

Nice to have

• Experience with Kubernetes
• NoSQL experience (e.g. Elasticsearch)
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code concepts (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar)
• Experience working in environments that value rapid iteration, code quality, and operational excellence

What we offer

• Software Engineer (Partner 16): salary of $269,000-$314,000
• Senior Software Engineer (Partner 18): salary of $301,000-$352,000
• Eligibility to participate in the a16z Carry program and various discretionary bonus programs
• Health, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance
• 401K plan
• Vacation and sick leave
• In-office presence required 2-3 days per week in San Francisco, CA

About a16z crypto

a16z crypto is part of Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm founded in 2009 that backs entrepreneurs building the future through technology. a16z has $100B+ under management and invests across multiple stages and sectors including crypto, AI, fintech, consumer, enterprise, and others. The firm has invested in companies like Coinbase, Figma, GitHub, Stripe, and SpaceX.