Founding Engineer

About the Role We're a Y Combinator-backed GovTech AI startup building AI-powered voice agents for local government departments — helping civil servants automate routine constituent inquiries, improve service responsiveness, and free up staff to focus on higher-value work. Our product handles calls 24/7 across dozens of languages and integrates with existing government technology stacks. We're hiring a Founding Engineer to join our small, early team and help shape the technical foundation of the product. This is a high-ownership, high-impact role where you'll work directly with the founding team — making architecture decisions, shipping production features end-to-end, and helping define how we build as the company scales. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role. What You'll Do Design and implement core product features across the full stack — frontend, backend, and infrastructure. Own architecture and infrastructure decisions to support scalable, reliable production systems. Ship production-quality code quickly and iterate based on real user and customer feedback. Build and maintain APIs, services, and data models that power the product. Establish DevOps practices including CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, observability, and reliability standards. Collaborate closely with founders and cross-functional partners on product direction and priorities. Participate in customer conversations to translate needs into technical solutions. Help mentor and recruit early engineering hires as the team grows. What We're Looking For Must-haves: 3+ years of professional software engineering experience building and shipping production web applications. Proven experience shipping end-to-end features at an early-stage or small startup. Experience deploying and maintaining cloud-based services with CI/CD pipelines. Proficiency in at least one core backend language (e.g., Node.js, Python, or Go). Experience designing and consuming RESTful APIs with proper versioning and security considerations. Experience building MVPs and iterating quickly based on user feedback. Experience designing and working with relational and/or NoSQL databases, including data modeling. Full-stack development experience — backend APIs and frontend UI. Strong fundamentals in software design, algorithms, and system architecture. Excellent communication skills and a collaborative, product-minded approach. Nice-to-haves: Frontend development experience with modern frameworks such as React or Vue, including responsive UI design. Experience with containerization and cloud-native architectures (Docker, Kubernetes). Experience with observability, monitoring, and error reporting tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Sentry). Background working on software for government, public sector, or similarly regulated domains. Compensation & Benefits Compensation details were not specified for this role. Equity participation is expected given the founding-team nature of the position. Specific package details will be discussed during the interview process. Location This is an on-site role based in Los Angeles, CA . Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States — visa sponsorship is not available. #J-18808-Ljbffr