CareerPlanGet AI match score →

Founding Engineer

San Francisco💼 Full-time🗓 2026-08-01

About the Role

We're an early-stage, fast-growing enterprise AI platform (agentic operating system for businesses) that has achieved strong product-market fit and is growing revenue rapidly. Backed by Y Combinator and prominent angel investors from the AI and SaaS world, we have thousands of AI agents deployed at scale-up startups and enterprise companies today.

This is a founding engineer role — you'll operate at near-CTO level, taking vague problems all the way to shipped product with no hand-holding. You'll be backend-heavy and AI-native, but fully capable of going full-stack when needed. If you've ever wanted to shape a product and company from the ground up, this is that seat.

What You'll Do

• Own large product areas end-to-end — from user insight through to production

• Build and continuously improve our agentic systems: accuracy, reliability, and capability

• Work at the frontier of AI engineering — context engineering, tool use, and agent architectures

• Talk directly to users, understand their pain points, and scope features that actually solve problems

• Ship full-stack when needed: Go backend, React + Vite (TypeScript) frontend

• Champion AI-first development practices — coding agents, automation, and ruthless self-scaling

• Review code quickly while maintaining high standards across the codebase

• Design and work with APIs (REST and/or gRPC) in microservices architectures

• Own CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, deployment workflows, and production observability

What We're Looking For

Must-haves:

• Proven production experience building backend services in Go (Golang) — this is a dealbreaker

• Authorized to work in the United States without visa sponsorship

• Experience building frontend applications with React and TypeScript

• Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and production monitoring/observability

• Experience building and consuming APIs (REST and/or gRPC) in microservices environments

• 0–3 years of professional software engineering experience (full-stack or equivalent)

Strong pluses:

• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or equivalent) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)

• Prior experience with AI infrastructure, prompt engineering, model deployment, or agent orchestration

• Experience designing and shipping AI-driven products; familiarity with agentic AI systems, LLMs, or AI agents

• Previous startup experience or a founding/early engineer background

• Experience with relational databases (Postgres/MySQL) and NoSQL, with solid understanding of data storage trade-offs

• AI research background or experience at an AI tooling/coding startup

• Former founder — or someone who has built something meaningful from scratch (startup, side project, shipped feature)

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience

You thrive if you:

• Are a sharp, autonomous problem-solver who doesn't need a PM to decide what to build

• Have deep product sense and build for users, not for code's sake

• Are obsessed with using and building AI-first development tools (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, coding agents)

• Love clean, maintainable Go and hold high standards in code review

• Thrive in ambiguity and move fast without sacrificing quality

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $120,000 – $250,000 USD annually, reflecting the outsized impact of this founding role

• Equity: Generous equity package commensurate with a founding-level position

• Unlimited AI tooling budget — we practice what we preach

• A seat at the table: you will shape the product and the company's direction

Location

• On-site in San Francisco, CA

• Visa sponsorship is not available — candidates must be authorized to work in the United States

Sourced via ashby · Listed on CareerPlan, which tracks 70,000+ jobs from 20+ sources.
Apply on Ashby ↗