Founding Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

About the Role

This is a Founding Engineer role at a Y Combinator-backed enterprise AI startup building the agentic operating system for modern businesses. The platform orchestrates AI agents that automate complex operational and sales workflows at scale — deployed across scale-up startups and enterprise companies alike, with strong product-market fit and rapid revenue growth.

You will operate at a near-CTO level: taking vague problems, scoping them, building end-to-end, and shipping real value — with no hand-holding and no waiting for specs. This is a seat at the table. You'll help shape the product, the architecture, and the company itself.

No visa sponsorship is available. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship.

What You'll Do

• Own large parts of the product end-to-end — from user insight to production

• Build and continuously improve agentic systems: accuracy, reliability, and capability

• Work at the frontier of AI engineering — context engineering, tool use, and agent architectures

• Talk directly to users, understand their pain points, and scope features that genuinely solve problems

• Go full-stack when needed: Go backend and React + Vite (TypeScript) frontend

• Champion AI-first development practices — coding agents, automation, and aggressive self-scaling

• Review code quickly while maintaining high standards across the codebase

• Design, build, and ship AI-driven product features with a focus on real-world impact

What We're Looking For

Must-haves (dealbreakers):

• Proven production experience building backend services in Go (Golang)

• Authorization to work in the United States without visa sponsorship

Required skills & experience:

• Frontend experience with React and TypeScript (modern JS frameworks)

• Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, deployment workflows, and production observability/monitoring

• Experience building and consuming REST and/or gRPC APIs in microservices architectures

• 0–3 years of professional software engineering experience (full-stack or equivalent)

• Deep product sense — you build for users, not for code's sake

• Comfortable with ambiguity; you don't need a PM to tell you what to build

Nice-to-haves:

• Prior experience with AI infrastructure, model deployment, prompt engineering, or agent orchestration

• Experience building agentic AI systems or AI coding tools (e.g. familiarity with LLMs, agent frameworks)

• Previous startup experience or founding/early-engineer background; having built something from scratch is a strong plus

• Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, or equivalent) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)

• Experience with relational databases (Postgres/MySQL) and NoSQL, with an understanding of storage trade-offs

• AI research background or experience at an AI coding startup

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $120,000 – $250,000 USD annually (reflecting outsized impact)

• Equity: Generous equity package commensurate with a founding-level role

• Unlimited AI tooling budget — the team actively uses and advocates for AI-first development

• Direct collaboration with technical co-founders in a high-growth, high-ownership environment

• Rapid career growth in a genuinely founding-level seat

Location

This role is on-site in San Francisco, CA . The company is headquartered in San Francisco and expects in-person collaboration.