Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer (Product and AI Agents) | New York, NY

I am recruiting on behalf of a YC-backed seed-stage startup building the AI-native operating system for restaurant back-of-house. They are hiring a founding engineer to work as a second technical co-founder.

About the company

Restaurants still run on spreadsheets, clipboards and disconnected tools. This company replaces that stack. Computer vision and voice AI capture inventory 90% faster than manual counts, ML models forecast item-level demand at about 97% accuracy, and AI agents run workflows end to end, including procurement, invoice reconciliation, scheduling, prep and menu engineering.

Founded in 2026, the team is fewer than 10 people in NYC. In under four months they signed 150+ restaurants across the US, Canada and Europe, and they have grown 25% week over week for three months straight.

The role

The company is deploying at scale and the CTO is currently the single technical point of failure. You will take big, vague problems and drive them to done. You will shape the roadmap, speak directly with customers, help sell the product and have a voice in strategy from day one. Some customers have custom workflows, so you may own those directly.

What you will work on

• Own the agent harness: context management, orchestration, persistent state and human-approval flows for agents handling real money
• Solve hard data problems: POS, accounting and payroll integrations, background jobs and pipelines that produce clean ground truth
• Make agents dependable: evals built from real operator workflows, failure tracing, recovery and escalation, and model choices based on production evidence
• Own the full lifecycle from order to the interface a manager approves it in, across backend services and React
• Help build early roadmap items, including payments infrastructure and a proactive assistant for restaurant managers

What we are looking for

• 1 to 3 years of experience, AI-native, with a product engineering (React) and/or LLM and agentic applications focus
• Strong fundamentals in Python or JS/TS, and willingness to become productive in both
• Tool-using agents shipped to production, with the ability to discuss harness design, evals and failure modes in depth
• Experience with LangGraph, LangChain or LangSmith, RAG, SQL and NoSQL data modeling, and sound judgment on agent loop versus deterministic workflow
• Something substantial you have built, and you can explain the architecture, trade-offs and what you would change
• Founder mentality: you have founded something, want to, or cannot stop building
• Strong product taste and attention to messy details
• Clear communication and comfort working directly with customers
• Early startup experience at a fast-scaling company is strongly preferred

Tech Stack

GCP, distributed systems, NoSQL, event-driven architecture, REST APIs, React, Python and TypeScript.

If you want to know more about this role, please apply below and I will be in contact to discuss the role further.