Founding Developer Product Engineer & Community Manager, AI Trust Infrastructure

Stealth · Westport, CT (NY Metro / Fairfield County) · Hybrid, 1–2 days a week in person to start · Q4 2026

Join the Founding Engineer Team at a founder-funded AI trust infrastructure company as the Founding Developer Product Engineer & Community Manager. Working prototype in review and test, development partners next, pre-seed/seed financing in progress, founder has gone founding-to-IPO before.

The problem

Agents are being handed real authority: approving, moving money, changing systems, negotiating with other agents. Today no one can prove what an agent saw, decided, or did, and watching an agent is not the same as verifying it. Humans and systems need to constrain, correct, and sign off on agent decisions, before and after the fact, across every framework and model in use: LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, the OpenAI Agents SDK, the Anthropic Agent SDK, Google ADK, and MCP.

We are building the standard any agentic deployment adopts, from a team's first ten agents to an enterprise's ten thousand. How we do it stays under wraps until the development-partner phase.

Why this seat exists

A standard is adopted by developers or it is not a standard. The product ships as an SDK into the hands of engineers building agents, and the company wins when those engineers trust it, build on it, and tell each other about it. This seat owns the developer experience, the community around it, and the loop that turns what developers say and do into what we build next. It is an engineering seat with a community mandate, not a marketing seat with a GitHub login. You ship every week, AI-native, with coding agents under your direction, and a quarter of your time in the SDK repo.

What you own in the first two quarters

The developer experience surface. Quickstarts that work in five minutes, reference docs, and example repos for each framework we integrate with, written so both a person and a coding agent can follow them (structured examples, an llms.txt, MCP-ready samples).

The development-partner program. The first two or three design partners onboarded, instrumented, and heard: weekly contact, feedback that engineering reads, and the written case for what ships next.

The community from zero. The first hundred developers before public launch, then the first thousand: GitHub discussions, a chat server, office hours, and release notes people read. Measured by developers who come back, not followers.

After launch: a public benchmark community, a contributor program with a path to maintainer, the developer-facing changelog and a standing voice in roadmap decisions, and the launch narrative in your own voice.

What you bring

Five or more years as a working software engineer, at least two in developer relations, developer experience, or product engineering for a developer tool, SDK, or API that other engineers adopted. Recently agentic: you have built with agent frameworks and published examples or an MCP server.

You have grown a developer community from small to meaningful and can show the numbers: contributors, active members, returning developers, not followers.

Founding or pre-scale stage, where you were the only one doing this job.

You build, agentically: Python and TypeScript at a level to ship example apps, framework integrations, and SDK fixes with coding agents under your direction.

You have owned developer documentation end to end, with examples tested in CI, and you know what an agent needs from docs that a person does not.

You have run a program with a feedback loop into product (beta, design-partner cohort, ambassador program, or open-source contributor base).

You have lived open-source community dynamics: maintainers, triage, release notes, a code of conduct, and what to do when a thread turns.

AI-native in production: you shipped something where a model or agent is a production component, wrote evals, and watched it fail in front of users. Familiarity with at least two of the frameworks above.

You can hold a room: a talk, a livestream, a workshop, a hard thread.

Moxie, intelligence, ambition, and signal awareness: you ship under uncertainty, reason from first principles, want to build the community a standard is adopted through, and say out loud which three things matter this week.

You can be in Westport one to two days a week to start, with the rest remote: already in Fairfield County or the New York metro.

How we work

Westport, Connecticut, in person one to two days a week to start, remote the rest. We are on the Metro-North New Haven Line, just over an hour from Grand Central, and a short drive from Stamford, Norwalk, and New Haven. New York's developer community is a train ride away and this seat will be in it weekly. AI-native by default. You would be one of the first three hires, working directly with the founder, a repeat enterprise-software operator who has scaled teams from founding stage through IPO and acquisitions, and with the founding engineers. Decisions in days, not quarters.

Compensation

Base salary: $150,000–$205,000. This is the range we have set in good faith for this position; where you land depends on demonstrated depth. Founding equity, sized to experience and scope, four-year vest, one-year cliff. Benefits: medical, dental, and vision coverage; 401(k); flexible paid time off.

How we hire

Step 1: 30-minute conversation with the founder.

Step 2: 60-minute deep dive on a developer community or surface you grew: what you did, the numbers, what you would not repeat.

Step 3: A working session in Westport on a real problem, under NDA, or straight to step 4 when the fit is clear.

Step 4: References, then offer.

A working-together path: begin by meeting and ideating with us before either of us commits to the full-time seat. Say in your application which path you want.

How to apply

Email View email address on click.appcast.io with the subject "Developer Product Engineer — Westport": one artifact showing a developer surface or community you built (docs site, example repo, talk, community with numbers), three sentences on why this problem, and your LinkedIn profile saved as a PDF. No cover letter.

Notices

Pay transparency. The base salary range and benefits above are provided in accordance with Connecticut's pay transparency law, as amended by Public Act 26-12 (effective October 1, 2026). Equity and benefits are in addition to base salary.

Salary history. We will not ask about your current or prior compensation.

Fair chance. Consistent with Connecticut's fair chance employment law (Conn. Gen. Stat. § 31-51i), we do not ask about arrests, criminal charges, or convictions on an initial application, and we consider qualified applicants with records.

Equal opportunity. We are an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religious creed, age, sex, pregnancy, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, ancestry, present or past history of mental, intellectual, learning, or physical disability, genetic information, military or veteran status, status as a victim of domestic violence, erased criminal history record information, or any other characteristic protected by federal, Connecticut, or local law.

Accommodation. If you need a reasonable accommodation at any point in the application or interview process, tell us and we will provide it.

Work authorization. You must be authorized to work in the United States. We can support transfers of existing H-1B, O-1, or TN status; we are not initiating new visa sponsorship at this time.

Employment is at-will.