Founding Engineer

Mobasi is hiring a founding engineer to own infrastructure, DevOps, and productionization as we scale from our first pilots to dozens of customers this year. You'll be our first hire outside the three cofounders, joining at the stage where we've validated the product and are ready to scale.

We're bootstrapped, profitable, and shipping fast. Our customers use Mobasi to turn days of manual evidence analysis into minutes of automated investigation. In our early deployments, we've solved fraud cases, located child victims of sexual exploitation, tracked the exfiltration of company secrets, and more.

About the role & how we work

Our philosophy is simple: build a small engineering SWAT team enabled by the best AI and tooling. Our goal is to bring Mobasi to all 6,000+ US law enforcement agencies with a small, tight-knit squad of engineers. Everyone on the team has outsized responsibility, reach, and reward.

As our Founding Engineer, you'll take ownership over all backend infrastructure. Your job is to productionize what we learn, maintain the infrastructure that keeps investigations moving, and build the systems that let us ship faster and scale.

This is not a DevOps role where you're handed tickets. You will make architectural decisions, own compliance, and build the deployment systems that get our product into the hands of investigators.

Specifically, you will:

• Own the build and deployment pipeline. Today, we ship updates manually. You'll turn our process into an automated update delivery system that scales to thousands of customers.
• Take over cloud infrastructure. We use them all: AWS, GCP, Azure, Anthropic, and OpenAI. You'll manage dependencies across these providers, build systems for provisioning accounts and tracking usage, ensure we stay within thresholds for each customer, and keep everything secure and monitored.
• Own security and compliance. Law enforcement customers require CJIS compliance and SOC2. You'll own adherence to these frameworks, manage package security, and set up automated monitoring systems.
• Build CI/CD that handles our unique challenges. We're not running unit tests on small datasets. You'll handle integration tests involving tens or hundreds of gigabytes of forensic data and develop evaluation approaches for investigative outputs that aren't always deterministic.

What we're building

Mobasi builds autonomous AI agents that conduct digital forensics investigations for law enforcement. Our mission is to put advanced digital forensics tools into every investigator's hands through AI. Our flagship product orchestrates 150+ forensic analysis tools, providing investigators with natural language interfaces for deep evidence analysis and reporting.

Right now, 92% of crimes involve digital evidence, but agencies are drowning in it. Devices sit in backlogs for months and when investigators finally get to them, they're stuck doing manual searches across mountains of data, often missing what they need.

We work with agencies investigating cases where time is crucial - missing persons, trafficking, child exploitation, homicides. When we get it right, investigators find leads they would have missed. When we don't, cases go cold.

Who should apply

You should apply if:

• You're AI-native. You use AI day in and day out. You've been experimenting with agents, have an opinion on when to use Claude vs Cursor. You ship 5-10x faster than others by leveraging these tools, and you're excited about automating parts of your job away.
• You're comfortable owning infrastructure end-to-end. You've managed cloud accounts, built CI/CD pipelines, and dealt with compliance. You don't need someone to break work into tickets for you.
• You can move across the entire stack. This role focuses on infrastructure, but you can shift into writing application-level code, talking to customers, or whatever else needs doing. You're not someone who says "that's not my job".
• You pay attention to the details. We make heavy use of AI, but we can't "vibe-code" our way to a successful, secure investigative agent. You understand your systems deeply enough to own them in production.
• You're a continuous learner. You're on the cutting edge, teaching yourself new things every day. You have a curious mindset and evidence of self-driven projects - things you built because you wanted to, not because a manager assigned them.
• You're mission-driven and believe in the mission of Mobasi. You see law enforcement as a force for good that deserves better technology.

You shouldn't apply if:

• You don't use AI in your daily work. This is a hard requirement. We're building an AI-native company, and we need engineers who already think this way. This doesn't mean that AI is a crutch; we don't produce slop. It means that we're focused on impact for our customers and communities, and are willing to use the best tools to get there.
• You need structure and process to be productive. We don't have sprint planning, daily standups, or well-defined project management. You'll need to drive your own work and results.
• You want to focus purely on technical challenges. You'll talk to customers, deal with compliance paperwork, and handle whatever is necessary to achieve the goals of the company. Our team is too small for narrow specialization.
• You're looking for a big company pedigree to optimize for exit options. We operate differently than many startups and take pride in that. Our goal isn't to maximize company valuation; it's to build an exceptional product and a profitable, sustainable business with a long-term mindset & proper fundamentals. We're bootstrapped and offer competitive base salary with profit sharing.

Interview process

We want to see how you actually work, not how well you memorize algorithms:

1. Initial screen
2. Technical screen
3. Take-home project (paid)
4. Work trial (paid)
5. Offer

Throughout the process, we'll be evaluating your ability to wield AI, solve relevant technical challenges, and see how well you can think on your feet. We're motivated to move quickly and will let you know next steps within 24 hours of each stage.

Tech stack

We do not expect you to have experience with all of these, but will expect you to ramp up quickly. At a minimum, you should have experience provisioning cloud accounts, connecting to APIs, and dealing with authentication across Mac, Linux, and Windows systems.

• Languages: Rust, TypeScript, Python, PowerShell, Bash
• Runtime & Builds: Node, Bun, pnpm, Turborepo, Cargo, Vitest
• Frameworks: Next.js, React, Tauri
• Infrastructure: GitHub, Docker, Pulumi, Terraform
• Cloud: AWS, GCP, Azure, Anthropic, OpenAI

Compensation

• Competitive salary and profit sharing: Transparent financials and cash in your pocket every year starting at $240k per year.
• Healthcare: Generous plans for individuals & families
• Relocation: Negotiable stipend for candidates moving to Austin
• Equipment: Top of the line Mac hardware, NVIDIA GPUs, and more
• Extracurriculars : Take work days at the range with our law enforcement partners

We're based in Austin. Strong preference for candidates who will work locally - we believe in sitting together and grinding it out. But we'll go up the stack to remote for the right person.

IMPORTANT

If our mission resonates with you, but this role isn't the right fit, or you're just developing your own opinions on using AI - please reach out. We're flexible on the scope of the role for the right teammate, and always looking to meet talented, aligned builders.