Founding Engineer
$120k - $180kDigital Waffle
Founding Engineer
Full-time | Hybrid — New York, NY | $120K–$180K + Competitive Equity
I'm working on behalf of a VC-backed startup (Google + Y Combinator among the backers) building the AI-native infrastructure to change that. They're looking for a Founding Engineer to help lead the charge — a lean team, real traction, and a founder's-mentality culture where the person who spots the problem is the person who gets to fix it.
If you want your code to touch production the same week you write it — not the same quarter — keep reading.
What you'll actually be doing
- Build AI-powered agents that ingest, parse, and standardize complex financial documents — turning manual busywork into automated pipelines.
- Lead the consolidation of two separate engineering systems into one unified, scalable architecture. This is greenfield-meets-legacy — real architectural ownership, not just following existing patterns.
- Own systems end-to-end : scoping, design, deployment, and everything after.
- Sharpen the CI/CD pipeline to push development velocity and system stability further.
- Sit directly with operations teams , understanding the manual workflows that eat their day, and shipping the automation that solves it.
Who thrives here
- 0–5 years of full-stack experience , ideally with AI-powered applications you've shipped and watched gain real user traction.
- You've gone 0 to 1 before and you want to do it again — this time with more ownership.
- You're gritty and creative under ambiguity; nobody's handing you a fully-scoped ticket.
- You want to be in the room — three days a week in NYC, working shoulder-to-shoulder with the team building this.
$200k - $400k
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