Founding Engineer - (Backend, Front End, Data, Full Stack)

Our client, an early-stage AI Startup, is hiring a Founding Engineer to join their team in San Francisco. The successful candidate will play a key role in designing and scaling a multi-tenant, AI-native platform, from building the semantic foundation that allows autonomous agents to interpret data and taking action across sources ranging from ERP systems to unstructured documents and real-world signals.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop scalable data ingestion and transformation pipelines across both structured and unstructured data sources.

• Build and maintain a robust connector framework for integrating enterprise systems (ERP, CRM, PLM, legacy databases, emails, documents and spreadsheets).

• Architect and evolve the Data Fabric layer, including knowledge graphs and semantic data models.

• Prepare and vectorize data to support AI use cases such as RAG, summarization and intelligent alerting.

• Establish and manage data governance, lineage, and access control frameworks.

• Develop secure, well-designed APIs to enable access to enriched data across services and autonomous agents.

• Partner closely with ML teams to support model training, optimization and deployment pipelines.

Skillset

• At least five years’ experience building production-grade data infrastructure.

• Strong expertise in ETL/ELT pipelines, including tools such as Kafka, Airbyte, Fivetran and Meltano.

• Proven experience with workflow orchestration platforms such as Airflow, Dagster or Prefect.

• Hands-on experience processing unstructured data, including PDFs, emails, logs, spreadsheets and APIs.

• Familiarity with lakehouse architectures and formats such as Iceberg, Delta and Parquet.

• Solid understanding of graph databases and semantic modelling, including technologies like Neo4j, RDF and Gremlin.

• Strong API design capabilities, with experience in GraphQL and RESTful services.

• Experience implementing data governance frameworks, including RBAC, ABAC, data lineage, and quality controls.

Benefits

• Salary: $140k – $180k

• Equity.