Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer — Agentic AI & Forward Deployed Systems

Company: Arise

Stage: Early-stage / 0 → 1

Role: Founding Engineer

Focus: Agentic AI, Workflow Automation, Customer-Facing Engineering

Believe Bigger. Rise Together.

Arise is building the future of recruiting through AI-native systems, intelligent automation, and a relentless focus on helping ambitious companies grow.

We're starting with a simple belief: recruiting is filled with expensive, repetitive, fragmented workflows that shouldn't require armies of people, disconnected software, and endless manual follow-ups.

We believe AI agents can fundamentally change how companies find, engage, evaluate, and hire talent.

But we're not interested in building AI for the sake of AI.

We're interested in solving real problems, delivering measurable business outcomes, and building products that customers can't imagine operating without.

We're looking for a founding engineer who wants to help us figure out what to build, build it quickly, get it into customers' hands, and turn early experiments into a scalable business.

The Opportunity

This is not a traditional engineering role.

You won't inherit a mature product, a carefully groomed backlog, or a team of product managers telling you what to build.

You'll work directly with the founder and customers to discover problems, design solutions, develop prototypes, and identify which ideas deserve to become real products.

One day, you might be sitting with a recruiting leader mapping out their entire interview process.

The next, you're building an agent that automates candidate engagement, coordinates interviews, or identifies bottlenecks before they cost a company a great hire.

Your job is to move between customer conversations, product discovery, and hands-on engineering without losing momentum.

You'll be measured by problems solved, customer adoption, speed to value, and commercial impact—not lines of code or tickets closed.

What You'll Own

1. Build Agentic Systems From 0 → 1

• Architect, prototype, and deploy AI agents that automate complex recruiting workflows.
• Build systems that reason, take actions, integrate with existing platforms, and escalate decisions when human judgment is needed.
• Work with LLMs, APIs, orchestration frameworks, databases, and third-party systems to create reliable, production-capable solutions.
• Make pragmatic build-versus-buy decisions to get working solutions in customers' hands quickly.
• Design for observability, evaluation, security, and reliability as prototypes evolve into production systems.

2. Become Obsessed With Customer Problems

• Work directly with founders, recruiting leaders, hiring managers, and other nontechnical stakeholders.
• Translate ambitious, ambiguous, and sometimes unrealistic requests into clear technical opportunities.
• Ask better questions to uncover the real problem behind what customers say they want.
• Map workflows, identify bottlenecks, and quantify the business impact of solving them.
• Communicate technical tradeoffs in plain English and build trust with customers.

You should genuinely enjoy working with people who don't speak engineering.

3. Prototype Fast. Validate Faster.

• Turn an ambiguous customer problem into a working demonstration in days, not months, whenever feasible.
• Build scrappy, functional prototypes to test assumptions before investing in complex infrastructure.
• Identify the smallest possible MVP that creates meaningful value.
• Put solutions in front of real users, collect feedback, and iterate relentlessly.
• Know when to throw away a prototype, improve it, or turn it into a scalable product.

A prototype isn't successful because it works. It's successful when it proves a customer wants the solution.

4. Build Products People Will Pay For

• Partner with the founder to identify the intersection of technical feasibility, customer urgency, and willingness to pay.
• Participate in customer discovery, technical demonstrations, pilots, and early sales conversations.
• Help define paid proofs of concept and measurable success criteria.
• Prioritize solutions that generate revenue, reduce costs, improve productivity, or create meaningful competitive advantages.
• Recognize patterns across customer implementations that can evolve into repeatable, scalable products.

We don't want to spend six months building something only to discover nobody wants to buy it.

5. Help Build the Engineering Culture

As a founding engineer, you'll help shape how Arise builds technology.

• Establish pragmatic engineering standards and architectural foundations.
• Choose the right tools without becoming emotionally attached to a particular stack.
• Balance speed with the reliability required for real customer workflows.
• Embrace AI-assisted development and new approaches to software engineering.
• Help determine which solutions remain customized and which become core product capabilities.
• Contribute to future technical hiring and engineering leadership as the company grows.

Who You Are

You're a builder before you're a planner.

You'd rather get a working prototype in front of a customer than spend three weeks debating the perfect architecture.

You're comfortable with ambiguity.

You don't need a detailed PRD to get started. You can take an ambitious idea, break it into testable assumptions, and figure out the next step.

You love nontechnical customers.

You can spend hours with an operations leader understanding why their process breaks, then turn that conversation into software that makes their life easier.

You think commercially.

You understand that elegant code doesn't matter if nobody buys the product. You care about adoption, revenue, ROI, and customer outcomes.

You're naturally curious.

You enjoy understanding how businesses actually operate, where humans get stuck, and how software can unlock new possibilities.

You have strong opinions, loosely held.

You can defend your technical decisions, but customer evidence matters more than your ego.

You have founder-level ownership.

When something breaks, you fix it. When a customer needs help, you engage. When you see an opportunity, you don't wait for permission.

What We're Looking For

• Strong full-stack software engineering experience, with the ability to independently build and ship end-to-end applications.
• Hands-on experience building with LLMs, AI agents, tool calling, structured outputs, and workflow orchestration.
• Experience integrating APIs, SaaS products, databases, and external systems.
• Demonstrated ability to move quickly from idea to prototype to deployed solution.
• Experience working directly with customers or nontechnical business stakeholders.
• Strong product instincts and an understanding of how to identify MVPs.
• Ability to navigate technical ambiguity and independently make pragmatic architectural decisions.
• Familiarity with production considerations such as testing, evaluations, monitoring, permissions, and data security.

Bonus Points

• Previously worked as a founding engineer, forward deployed engineer, or technical founder.
• Built and launched a product from scratch.
• Experience deploying AI solutions inside real business operations.
• Experience with recruiting, staffing, HR technology, or enterprise workflow automation.
• Worked on a product that generated meaningful revenue or converted early pilots into paying customers.
• Experience at an early-stage startup where speed, adaptability, and resourcefulness were essential.

We care more about what you've built, how you think, and whether customers used it than where you went to school or how impressive your résumé looks.

Why Join Arise?

Because you want to build something from the beginning.

You want real ownership. You want to be close to customers. You want your engineering decisions to directly influence whether a business succeeds.

You want to work on AI systems that actually do things—not another chatbot demo.

And you want to help build a company where ambitious people can believe bigger and rise together.

If you're excited by the idea of going from a messy customer conversation on Monday to a working solution by Friday, we want to meet you.

Let's build something that matters.

How to Apply

Skip the generic cover letter.

Show us something you've built.

Tell us about a time you:

1. Took an ambiguous business problem and turned it into a working product.
2. Built and shipped an MVP quickly, then learned something unexpected from customers.
3. Made a technical decision based on what would create the most customer value rather than what was most technically interesting.

We'd love to see demos, GitHub repositories, live products, or anything else that demonstrates how you think and build.

Arise — Believe Bigger. Rise Together.