Senior / Staff Software Engineer

Who We Are

Impruve is a boutique forward-deployed engineering firm that helps wealth management firms get real business results from AI. We embed directly with our clients to build production data pipelines, AI tools, custom software, and compliance infrastructure for top-tier firms managing billions in client assets. We have more demand than we can currently serve, and we're growing the team to meet it.

Our founders previously built and exited Packback, an AI company that served more than 3 million users. We operate with the speed of a small startup and the rigor of a top firm.

We're four engineers right now, and we're building how we work on purpose, not backfilling a culture after the fact. We care about doing right by clients and by each other. We take the work seriously: real client money, real compliance risk, real production systems. We do team-wide retros every two months to make sure we're all on the same page and continually improving.

We pair early and often, across the team, because it's how we actually get better. If you notice something interesting mid-task, we want you to flag it and pull someone in, not disappear down a rabbit hole solo. When something breaks, we run blameless postmortems; the point is fixing the system, not finding someone to blame.

We don't expect you to walk in with all the answers. Nobody here has them either. We expect you to be scrappy: willing to try something, see what happens, and figure it out with the team rather than wait until you're sure.

You won't be joining something fully formed. You'd be joining our founding engineering team, with real say in how this team works, not just what it ships.

Why This Role

Most wealth management firms want to bring AI into their business, and they have access to the frontier models and the tooling around them. What’s missing is the engineering capability to deploy AI effectively and in a compliant manner. That’s the gap Impruve fills, so wealth managers can spend more of their time improving the lives of their clients.

You’d own client engagements end-to-end, from scoping the work with the client through architecting and shipping the system. This role is for engineers who are excited about getting hands-on experience deploying AI in production.

What You’ll Do

• Forward-Deployed Engineering: Embed directly with client teams and own engagements end-to-end: scoping the problem, shipping the system, and managing the client relationship. You’d typically run multiple client engagements in parallel.
• AI-Native Building: AI coding tools are table stakes. You’re fluent with agentic development workflows (spec-driven development, custom agent skills, and the frameworks emerging around them) and you continuously refine how AI multiplies your output.
• Full-Stack Engineering: Work across data engineering (pipelines, transforms), AI engineering (RAG/graphs, evals, memory, agent workflows), and the backend and frontend work that ties it together so it holds up in production.
• Systems Design: Architect platforms that change how clients operate. You’re building reliable, observable systems with clean UX that keeps humans in the loop.
• Shape the Firm: Each engineer here has a real hand in how we run engagements and how Impruve scales to become the leading forward-deployed engineering firm in wealth management. You’d be instrumental in building our practice.

What You’ll Bring to the Team

• Strong Engineering Fundamentals: You design and ship reliable systems. You turn ambiguous problems into clean production code.
• 5+ Years of Hands-On Engineering Experience: Most of it building and operating production systems.
• Cross-Domain Fluency: You move comfortably between data, infrastructure, backend, and AI. You don’t need to be an expert in all four, but you can make sound calls and own an engagement without constant escalation.
• Hands-On AI Systems Work: Agentic workflows, RAG pipelines, LLM integrations, evals, or memory systems, built as the core of the product rather than bolted onto a legacy workflow.
• AI-Native Mindset: You’re excited about AI as a force multiplier for engineering. You actively experiment, form opinions about what’s working, and bring new techniques back to the team.
• Comfortable in the Room: You hold your own in front of clients. You can explain technical concepts without oversimplifying or hiding behind jargon, including the hard conversations about scope and tradeoffs.
• Bias for Outcomes: You judge your own work by what changed for the client, not by what you produced.

Stack: Python, Node.js, Express, TypeScript, Next.js, MongoDB, Redis, AWS ECS, Docker, LangChain/LangGraph. We care more about sound judgment across domains than a checklist match.

Compensation

$150,000 to $200,000 all-cash compensation.

Our Workplace

We work on a hybrid in-person / remote schedule from our Chicago office, but we're open to fully remote for candidates outside Chicago. Close collaboration is part of how we build, and we make remote work well.

Different Perspectives Make Us Better

Research consistently shows that women and people from underrepresented groups are less likely to apply to a role unless they check every box, while others apply anyway. If that's you: apply anyway. We care more about curiosity, scrappiness, and kindness than a perfect resume match, and we build a better team when the people on it don't all think alike.

Hiring Process

We respect your time. We keep the hiring process tight and decide quickly:

1. Intro call (45 minutes).
2. Team interview with the founders, including a working session on a realistic engineering problem.
3. Decision and offer.

Requires US work authorization; we can't sponsor visas.