Founding Full-Stack Engineer

Who is Recruiting from Scratch:

Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers, software, and hardware talent at innovative companies. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across the United States to help them hire.

Founding Full-Stack Engineer

Location: San Francisco, CA
Company Stage of Funding: Seed Stage / Applied AI + Wearable Technology + Industrial AI Startup
Office Type: On-site (5 days/week in San Francisco)
Salary: $180,000 - $240,000 Base
Equity: 0.25% - 0.75%
Bonus: Competitive total compensation package
Visa: Supports O-1, TN, E-3, H-1B1, H-1B transfers, H-1B COS, OPT/STEM OPT (must already be in US)
Company Description

Our client is building wearable AI copilots for industrial field workers using smart glasses powered by agentic vision-language models (VLMs).

The platform enables frontline workers across data centers, energy grids, aerospace, manufacturing, and industrial operations to access real-time AI assistance directly through wearable devices.

Founded in 2026 by two founders with backgrounds in mechanical engineering, robotics, computer vision, and AI research.

Currently operating as a highly technical 2-person founding team with plans for rapid growth.

Raised approximately $5M in seed funding led by A* with participation from Valor and other strategic investors.

Already deployed with world-leading enterprise customers across data center and energy infrastructure environments.

The company sits at the intersection of:

• Wearable AI
• Smart glasses
• Computer vision
• Agentic AI systems
• Industrial automation
• Robotics infrastructure
• Enterprise software

Engineering challenges involve building low-latency video pipelines, real-time AI inference systems, mobile applications, backend infrastructure, and integrations into legacy enterprise environments.

The company is still early enough for engineers to have significant ownership while already demonstrating meaningful enterprise traction and revenue potential.

The culture values ownership, intensity, technical excellence, speed, and building products that solve real-world operational problems.
What You Will Do

• Ship the end-to-end product experience connecting smart glasses, backend systems, and companion applications
• Build and optimize real-time video streaming infrastructure powering wearable AI systems
• Develop low-latency pipelines connecting field devices to AI services
• Design and maintain backend APIs supporting device communication and AI workflows
• Build scalable data infrastructure and backend services
• Develop mobile and desktop applications used by industrial customers
• Own deployment, release, and update infrastructure for field hardware
• Build systems that operate reliably in production industrial environments
• Design architecture capable of supporting large fleets of deployed devices
• Work across frontend, backend, mobile, infrastructure, and device layers
• Integrate AI services and agent workflows into customer-facing products
• Debug issues across the entire stack from device to cloud infrastructure
• Collaborate directly with founders on product and engineering strategy
• Define engineering standards and architectural decisions during company growth
• Own projects end-to-end from design through deployment
• Help shape engineering culture as one of the earliest hires
• Build systems that support future robotics and industrial automation initiatives
• Operate with significant autonomy and ownership

Ideal Candidate Background

• 2-6 years of post-graduate software engineering experience
• Experience building and shipping scalable products from 0-to-1
• Strong full-stack engineering capabilities
• Experience owning end-to-end service architecture
• Startup experience as an early engineer or founding engineer preferred
• Experience working in high-intensity startup environments
• Experience building real-time video, streaming, or low-latency systems
• Experience shipping AI-powered products into production
• Experience integrating LLMs, agents, or AI pipelines into applications
• Strong frontend, backend, and infrastructure engineering skills
• Experience developing mobile applications (iOS, Android, or React Native)
• Experience building scalable cloud-native systems
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and system design skills
• Comfortable making independent architectural decisions
• Strong problem-solving ability and technical curiosity
• Experience working directly with users and customer-facing products
• Strong CS or engineering educational background or equivalent track record
• Demonstrated evidence of grit, initiative, or exceptional achievement

Strong Signals

• Experience at companies such as Anduril, Tesla, SpaceX, Waymo, Cruise, Neuralink, xAI, or similar organizations
• Experience at real-time video infrastructure companies such as Mux, Twitch, Loom, LiveKit, Agora, Vimeo, or YouTube
• Startup experience with meaningful ownership and product responsibility
• Founding Engineer or early startup engineering experience
• Experience building video-heavy applications
• Experience working on streaming infrastructure or WebRTC systems
• Strong React, React Native, TypeScript, or Node.js experience
• Experience deploying AI-powered applications
• Experience building multimodal AI products
• Experience in computer vision systems
• Experience with wearable devices or AR/VR products
• Experience working on industrial technology products
• Strong cloud infrastructure experience (AWS, GCP, Supabase, Railway)
• Entrepreneurial or founder background
• Competitive programming, Olympiad, or exceptional technical achievement history
• Strong GitHub activity or side projects
• Demonstrated ability to build products from concept to production

Compensation and Benefits

• Base salary: $180,000 - $240,000
• Equity: 0.25% - 0.75%
• Opportunity to join an extremely early-stage AI company
• Significant ownership and influence over product direction
• Direct collaboration with founders and leadership
• Exposure to cutting-edge AI, computer vision, and wearable technology
• High autonomy and end-to-end ownership
• Opportunity to define engineering culture during company formation
• Work on challenging technical problems involving video, AI, and real-world deployment
• Fast-moving startup culture with strong customer traction
• Opportunity to help shape the future of industrial AI systems
• Exposure to robotics, automation, and enterprise AI applications

Why Join

This is an opportunity to help build one of the most ambitious applied AI products in the market today.

Rather than building another chatbot or AI wrapper, the company is deploying production-grade AI systems into industrial environments where reliability, latency, and real-world impact matter.

You'll work directly with founders, own meaningful technical architecture, and help define the product platform powering wearable AI deployments across critical industries.