Founding Software Engineer

Founding Software Engineer

Title of Role: Founding Software Engineer

Location: Los Angeles, CA, Onsite

Company Stage of Funding: Seed — AI, Software Development

Office Type: Onsite

Salary: $250K–$300K

Company Description

We're representing a dynamic early-stage company that is building a next-generation customer research platform. Their mission is to democratize user research, making it accessible to every team through intelligent AI assistance that streamlines the entire study lifecycle. By leveraging advanced AI agents, they aim to eliminate the traditional barriers of user research, empowering teams with instant insights and deep customer understanding.

What You Will Do

• Collaborate closely with the founding team to architect, build, and ship core features across the full product stack.
• Design and develop systems that enable AI-driven conversational interviews, focusing on real-time dialogue management and adaptive questioning.
• Build and maintain infrastructure for the entire research lifecycle, including research plan generation, participant recruitment, and insight synthesis.
• Contribute to technical architecture decisions, tooling, and engineering processes as a foundational team member.
• Engage directly with users and stakeholders to translate research and product needs into scalable technical solutions.
• Establish engineering best practices, code quality standards, and development workflows that will grow with the team.
• Own features end-to-end, from initial design through deployment and iteration, with a high degree of autonomy.

Ideal Candidate Background

• Proven experience in building and shipping production software, ideally in a startup or fast-paced environment.
• Strong proficiency across the full stack, with hands-on experience in frontend and backend systems.
• Familiarity with integrating large language models, AI agents, or conversational AI systems.
• Demonstrated product instincts, with a focus on user experience alongside technical implementation.
• Ability to work autonomously and make sound decisions in ambiguous, fast-moving situations.

Preferred

• Prior experience at an early-stage or seed-stage startup, particularly in a founding or first-engineer role.
• Knowledge of NLP pipelines, prompt engineering, or frameworks for LLM orchestration.
• Experience in building real-time or streaming systems, especially those involving audio or live conversation interfaces.

Compensation and Benefits

The base salary for this role ranges from $250K to $300K. This position offers a unique opportunity to shape the product and engineering culture from the ground up in a rapidly evolving environment.