Lead Software Engineer, Product Backend

Company: Glean
Location: San Francisco
Posted on: April 3, 2026

Job Description:

About Glean: Glean is the Work AI platform that helps everyone work smarter with AI. What began as the industry’s most advanced enterprise search has evolved into a full-scale Work AI ecosystem, powering intelligent Search, an AI Assistant, and scalable AI agents on one secure, open platform. With over 100 enterprise SaaS connectors, flexible LLM choice, and robust APIs, Glean gives organizations the infrastructure to govern, scale, and customize AI across their entire business - without vendor lock-in or costly implementation cycles. At its core, Glean is redefining how enterprises find, use, and act on knowledge. Its Enterprise Graph and Personal Knowledge Graph map the relationships between people, content, and activity, delivering deeply personalized, context-aware responses for every employee. This foundation powers Glean’s agentic capabilities - AI agents that automate real work across teams by accessing the industry’s broadest range of data: enterprise and world, structured and unstructured, historical and real-time. The result: measurable business impact through faster onboarding, hours of productivity gained each week, and smarter, safer decisions at every level. Recognized by Fast Company as one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies (Top 10, 2025), by CNBC’s Disruptor 50, Bloomberg’s AI Startups to Watch (2026), Forbes AI 50, and Gartner’s Tech Innovators in Agentic AI, Glean continues to accelerate its global impact. With customers across 50 industries and 1,000 employees in more than 25 countries, we’re helping the world’s largest organizations make every employee AI-fluent, and turning the superintelligent enterprise from concept into reality. If you’re excited to shape how the world works, you’ll help build systems used daily across Microsoft Teams, Zoom, ServiceNow, Zendesk, GitHub, and many more - deeply embedded where people get things done. You’ll ship agentic capabilities on an open, extensible stack, with the craft and care required for enterprise trust, as we bring Work AI to every employee, in every company. About the Role: Glean is looking for creative engineers to own and launch delightful user facing features. In a rapidly growing startup, this entails developing ideas with product managers and designers to best balance engineering constraints with requirements, delivering intuitive experiences that run in modern mobile and desktop browsers. You will: Oversee the entirety of your greenfield features from inception to implementation, experimentation, launch and beyond Revolutionize the current experience by incorporating AI into the product Provide leadership and mentor more junior engineers Work with designers, product managers, data scientists, and other engineers to understand our problem space and create elegant solutions Architect REST APIs that are backed by stable, scalable server side implementations and maximize web client flexibility for rapidly meeting evolving product requirements Write robust code that’s efficient, easy to read, maintain and test About You: 5 years of experience in product engineering with 2 years as a TL/M BA/BS in computer science, or related degree Experience of building and shipping scalable features across frontend and backend Thrive in a customer-focused, tight-knit and cross-functional environment A proactive and positive attitude to lead, learn, troubleshoot and take ownership of both small tasks and large features A user-centric and empathetic mentality for building products Experience on a consumer grade web app frontend, preferably React based Love authoring easy-to-hold and future-proof REST APIs, OpenAPI is a plus Experience building distributed CRUD level functionality, ideally both SQL and NoSQL Comfortable in or desire to master Golang, Java and TypeScript Location: This role is hybrid (3-4 days a week in one of our SF Bay Area offices) Compensation & Benefits: The standard base salary range for this position is $140,000 - $265,000 annually. Compensation offered will be determined by factors such as location, level, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Certain roles may be eligible for variable compensation, equity, and benefits. We offer a comprehensive benefits package including competitive compensation, Medical, Vision, and Dental coverage, generous time-off policy, and the opportunity to contribute to your 401k plan to support your long-term goals. When you join, you'll receive a home office improvement stipend, as well as an annual education and wellness stipends to support your growth and wellbeing. We foster a vibrant company culture through regular events, and provide healthy lunches daily to keep you fueled and focused. We are a diverse bunch of people and we want to continue to attract and retain a diverse range of people into our organization. We're committed to an inclusive and diverse company. We do not discriminate based on gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, civil or family status, age, disability, or race. LI-HYBRID AI-First Mindset at Glean: At Glean, AI fluency is core to how we work and we're committed to ensuring every new hire feels confident integrating AI into their everyday work. As part of the interview process, you'll complete a brief AI-focused exercise or discussion so we can understand how you think about, design, and use AI to drive impact in your role. Feel free to reference any tools, platforms, or workflows you use today — prior Glean experience isn't required.

Keywords: Glean, Elk Grove , Lead Software Engineer, Product Backend, IT / Software / Systems , San Francisco, California