Founding Engineer

Role details

ABOUT THE ROLE This is a founding engineering role at a YC-backed enterprise AI startup building an agentic operating system that enables businesses to deploy and orchestrate AI agents at scale. You'll operate with CTO-level ownership — taking vague problems from user insight all the way to production — and play a direct hand in shaping both the product and the company. The role matters because the systems you build will power how enterprises automate complex, real-world workflows. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own large product areas end-to-end, from user research and scoping through to production deployment. - Build and continuously improve agentic systems, making them more accurate, reliable, and powerful. - Work at the frontier of AI engineering — context engineering, tool use, and multi-agent architectures. - Talk directly to users, understand their pain points, and scope features that solve real problems. - Ship full-stack when needed across a Go backend and Vite/TypeScript frontend. - Champion AI-first development practices — coding agents, automation, and relentless self-scaling. - Review code quickly and maintain high standards across the codebase. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - Demonstrated ability to own features end-to-end with minimal hand-holding, from ideation to production. - Hands-on experience designing and deploying AI-driven systems — agent architectures, context engineering, and tool use. - Strong track record of production readiness: monitoring, observability, performance tuning, and reliability. - Deep product sense with a history of building for user outcomes, not just clean code. - Proficiency in Go and care for clean, maintainable backend code; comfort going full-stack when needed. - Experience with modern AI development tooling (e.g., LLM-assisted coding, coding agents, AI-native workflows). - Thrives in ambiguity — you don't need a PM to tell you what to build next. - Prior experience building something from scratch (startup, founding role, or significant side project) is a strong plus. - US work authorization required — visa sponsorship is not available. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS Base salary $120,000–$250,000 USD annually, plus generous equity reflecting the founding-level impact of the role. Unlimited AI tooling budget included. LOCATION On-site in San Francisco, California, USA.