Founding Engineer
$150k - $200kClera
About the Role
This is the first full-time engineering hire outside the founding team at an early-stage AI developer tooling startup. You will own the entire loop from ingesting agent conversation data through automated patch generation and verification, building the infrastructure that helps engineering teams catch and fix failures their existing processes miss. The work you do here sets the technical and cultural standards for every engineer who follows.
What You'll Do
Ship end-to-end features spanning ingest pipelines, detection systems, patch generation, verification, and the user-facing product.
Own the trust surface, including reproduction logic, guardrails, and checks that prevent bad PRs from reaching customer repositories.
Move from customer problem to shipped solution independently, without waiting for formal specs or sign-off.
Engage directly with customers: read their traces, join their communication channels, and surface issues proactively.
Make lasting architectural decisions covering schema design, service boundaries, and speed-versus-correctness tradeoffs.
Define engineering culture from the ground up, including testing standards, on-call practices, and release criteria.
What We're Looking For
3+ years shipping production software with a demonstrated ability to work effectively outside a single specialty.
Strong TypeScript proficiency across the full stack, from frontend through core services (the entire codebase is TypeScript).
Real comfort working with high-volume event data, with cost-per-event thinking alongside correctness.
Experience designing and optimizing data pipelines and production systems with observability and monitoring in mind.
Hands-on experience building and operating AI agents in production, with clear opinions on how and why they fail.
Strong product sense: able to take rough, open-ended problems and return well-considered solutions without designs handed to you.
Experience making architectural decisions that shape long-term system design.
Comfortable working directly with customers to understand production failures and requirements.
Bonus: experience with PR review automation, code quality tooling, or early-stage founding team environments.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary range: $150,000 to $200,000 USD annually. Equity is expected given the founding-team-adjacent seniority of the role.
Location
On-site in San Francisco, California . This role requires working from the office six days per week.
- Hivemind is building a social AI that talks to many people at once, with one-on-one conversations. We are seeking founding members of technical staff to co-own the foundation from day zero and shape the team as it grows. You will define technical standards, build core...Suggested
$150k - $220k
...Compensation & Benefits $150,000–$220,000 base salary + meaningful founding-team equity. The Stack The stack is TypeScript hosted on... ...to eight people, founded by Girum Tihtina (ex-Meta payments engineering), Maurice Landers III (CTO, Harvey Mudd CS, design-engineer),...SuggestedFull timeDoctours
San Francisco, CA9 days ago- ...from across IT and security. Several design partners today and a founding team of three. Full-Time, In-person, San Francisco, CA.... ...About the Role: This is a backend- and systems-heavy founding engineering role where "full-stack" means owning the product and system end...SuggestedFull timeH1bVisa sponsorship
Thomas Talent Network
San Francisco, CAa month ago - ...Job Description Job Description SF Bay Area, California | Fully On-site We are seeking an Founding Computer Vision Engineer – Multimodal AI & VLMs to join an early-stage technology company building AI systems for real-world industrial environments. This role focuses...SuggestedWork at officeVisa sponsorship
MaxIT Consulting - Max Corporate Group
San Francisco, CA8 days ago - Trajectory, based in San Francisco, is seeking a Founding Generalist Engineer to craft the product experience for continual learning. The role involves owning the SDK and API surfaces while working directly with founders and industry-leading partners. Ideal candidates...Suggested
$150k - $250k
...cockpit to run the business. We just raised an oversubscribed 2,5mio angel round in 7 days and are moving at rapid speed. Founding Engineer You'd be the first hire. This is a once-in-a-generation shot to define how service companies get built. You'll own the...Visa sponsorshipOrpex
San Francisco, CA23 hours ago- ...About Loop Loop AI is a San Francisco–based tech company founded in 2022. We provide a Delivery Intelligence Platform for data-driven... ...first restaurants. About The Role We are looking for a Founding Engineer with 4+ years of backend engineering experience to join our fast...Temporary work
Loop AI - Delivery Intelligence Platform
San Francisco, CA23 hours ago - ...We’re looking for a founding engineer to build the system that runs industrial commerce. Avent is turning the global supply chain into a machine-to-machine system where products are quoted, sourced, and fulfilled at software speed. This is not about building features...Relocation
Avent (YC S25)
San Francisco, CA3 days ago - ...180 LPA. Min Experience: 1 years. Location: San Francisco Bay Area. JobType: full-time. We're looking for a highly motivated Founding Engineer to join us at the ground floor and help build our product from zero to one. This is a hands-on role for someone who thrives in...Full timeWeekday work
Weekday AI (YC W21)
San Francisco, CA2 days ago - ...About The Role We’re hiring a Founding Engineer to help architect and scale the core platform at Proaction. This is a hands‑on, high‑ownership role for someone who operates at a staff level but is excited to build in a fast‑moving, early‑stage environment. About The Role...
Pro Action
San Francisco, CA2 days ago $250k
...Our client is looking for an experienced Founding Engineer to build a production-grade Voice AI legal intake platform. This is the first engineering hire . The immediate challenge isn't simply building another AI prototype. It's taking an existing prototype and...Work at officeImmediate startRelocationJeffreyM Consulting
San Francisco, CA4 days ago$180k - $230k
...(CTO) and Chirag (CEO) are the team today. You'd be the second engineer: real-time voice, generative UI that redraws itself based on who... ...without being asked. Comp Base: $180-230K Equity: Founding-caliber Location: In-person, San Francisco Process 4...Live inWork at officeHOBBES Inc
San Francisco, CA23 hours ago$180k - $280k
...About the Role This is a founding engineer role at an early-stage AI startup building intelligent agent platforms for top-tier insurance carriers. You will own large swaths of the product end-to-end, working at the intersection of LLMs, unstructured data, and complex...Wintermeyer Ventures
San Francisco, CA2 days ago$160k - $180k
...About the job Founding Engineer Location: San Francisco, CA - In Person Compensation: $160,000-$180,000 base + meaningful early-stage equity Employment: Full-Time Experience: Early-career to ~4 years Visa Sponsorship: Not available at this time...Full timeRheaction
San Francisco, CA23 hours ago$150k - $250k
...Agentmail Engineer Opportunity Location: San Francisco, CA Type: Full-time, on-site We are seeing a surge in market demand as... ...for your email, it's email for your AI. We're looking for a founding engineer with strong backend and infra instincts to help build...Full timeAgentmail (yc s25)
San Francisco, CA23 hours ago$150k - $250k
...AgentMail is building the identity and communication infrastructure for AI agents, starting with email. We are looking for a Founding Engineer with backend and infra focus to architect systems for agents as the end users. Responsibilities: Design APIs that are...Work experience placementInternshipAgentMail
San Francisco, CA1 day ago- ...connections will form the foundation of the agentic internet – and Caylex will be the infrastructure powering it. The Role As a Founding Engineer, you’ll play a central role in shaping both our product and engineering culture. You will: Work full-stack across...Full timeWork at office
Caylex
San Francisco, CA2 days ago - ...Founding Engineer (Full Stack) Location: San Francisco Bay Area Type: Full-Time Compensation: Competitive salary + meaningful equity (founding tier) Backed by 8VC, we're building a world-class team to tackle one of the industry's most critical infrastructure problems...Full time
Fabrion
San Francisco, CA3 days ago - ...users constantly, and are just getting started. We're looking for engineers who want to own product from day one and help shape the future... ...parts of the codebase, and ship product fast. This is true founding-level ownership. You'll shape both the product and the company...Relocation
Socket
San Francisco, CA3 days ago $350k
...conversations consistent and personalized across all channels. Reverse engineering legacy healthcare systems that don't have public APIs to... ...who desperately need them. We're looking for exceptional founding engineers to help us realize this ambition. If you're an...Contract workNight shiftAlleviate Health Inc
San Francisco, CA4 days ago$160k - $210k
...About the job Founding Engineer Founding Engineer Global Placement Firm is conducting a confidential search for Founding Engineers to join a small, high-growth healthcare technology company in San Francisco focused on transforming how speech, occupational,...Full timePrivate practiceH1bWork at officeRelocationVisa sponsorshipGlobal Placement Firm
San Francisco, CA4 days ago$180k
...Culture Talent. We're excited to help connect talented professionals with this exceptional team! The Role We're hiring a Founding Engineer to join an early-stage company building AI-powered software and data infrastructure for healthcare organizations operating in...Work experience placementPeople Culture Talent
San Francisco, CA1 day ago- ...Join The Founding Engineering Team At Adam We're building the founding engineering team at Adam. At Adam, we're tackling a frontier problem: building a new way to interface with CAD via AI. This demands creativity, deep technical ability, and novel thinking....
adam.ai
San Francisco, CA3 days ago $200k - $300k
...About the Role You'll join a small founding engineering team as an early hire, working directly with the founders on every major decision at an AI-native B2B SaaS startup serving industrial ingredient manufacturers. The product spans document ingestion, LLM agents, and...Full timeRelocation$120k - $200k
...About the Role This is a founding engineering role at an early-stage hardware-meets-software startup building AI-assisted PCB design tooling and EDA automation. You will own the core platform from day one, working directly with the founding team to shape both the product...Full time$150k - $250k
...About the Role This is the first engineering hire at a pre-seed-funded startup building the infrastructure layer for AI-native service... ...ambiguity and breadth of being the first hire on an in-person founding team. Compensation & Benefits Base salary: $150,000 to...Full timeRelocationVisa sponsorshipRelocation package$200k - $300k
...build next, and ship it end to end. You'll be one of the first engineers and have a direct say in where the product goes. What you'll... ...autonomous, and don't need a curated task board Bonus: you've founded something, built developer tools or AI agents, or know GTM...Full time$250k
...transferred to us in real time. The company is bootstrapped and founded by a former startup and venture capital attorney. Sixteen... ...percent reply rate. About the Role This is the company’s first engineering hire, reporting directly to the Founder, who is currently the...Full timeCasual workWork at officeImmediate startRemote workRelocation$7.5k
Founding GTM Engineer (Series A Fintech / EdTech) Location and Commitment San Francisco, CA or Phoenix, AZ (In-Person, Full Time) | Seniority: Founding / Senior IC | Equity: Meaningful Founding Stake The Mission Architecting the Financial Rails for the $900B School Choice...Full timeLive inWork at officeWork from homeRelocationVisa sponsorshipRelocation package- ...About The Role We’re looking for a Forward Deployed Software Engineer to own the development and deployment of Petrarch’s front-facing... ...Experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, founding engineer, or similar customer-facing technical role. Experience...Full time
Do you want to receive more vacancies?
Subscribe and receive similar vacancies to Founding Engineer. Be the first to apply!
