Founding Engineer

About the Role A seed-stage AI infrastructure company — backed by prominent investors including researchers from OpenAI and DeepMind — is hiring 2–3 Founding Engineers to own the core of its graph-native database platform. Built on object storage and purpose-designed for AI agent workloads, the platform delivers persistent context and memory through semantic search, git-style temporal versioning, and entity resolution. This is a deep infrastructure role, not a feature factory. You will own significant pieces of the platform — query engine, storage layer, graph internals — and make architecture decisions that shape the product for years to come. You'll work directly alongside the founding team, with your name on both the design docs and the pull requests in the same week. What You'll Do Own and ship core infrastructure components: query execution engine, graph storage layer, and distributed systems Make long-horizon architecture decisions alongside the founding team with real product impact Contribute to benchmark and research work that defines the technical category Participate in architecture reviews and navigate hard technical trade-offs in production environments Help establish and raise the engineering bar as the team grows What We're Looking For Required: 3+ years of systems programming and distributed systems development Proficiency in Rust and/or Go; deep curiosity to go further Experience designing and implementing core infrastructure: query execution engines, storage layers, or graph internals Proven track record of architectural decision-making and contributing to long-term technical roadmaps Comfort owning large, ambiguous problems without a playbook in a fast-moving early-stage environment Strong CS fundamentals — you reason from first principles, not just frameworks Nice to Have: Experience building or scaling distributed databases or storage infrastructure Open source contributions to systems-level projects IIT or Recurse Center background Prior founding engineer or early-stage infrastructure role Note: Visa sponsorship is not available for this role. Compensation & Benefits Salary: $160,000 – $270,000 per year Meaningful early-stage equity — ownership that reflects a true builder's contribution Wellness programs and free daily meals in the office Top-tier hardware and software setup Flexible PTO focused on deep work over busywork Learning budget covering books, courses, conferences, and compute for experiments Periodic team offsites for planning, building, and resetting Location This role is on-site in San Francisco, CA. The team values in-person collaboration, especially at this stage of the company.