Founding Engineer

Role details

ABOUT THE ROLE This is a founding engineer role on a small, high-conviction infrastructure team building a graph-native context and memory platform purpose-built for AI agents. You'll own significant pieces of the core — query engine, graph storage internals, distributed systems — and make architecture decisions that shape the product for years to come. This is not a feature factory; every engineer here has direct influence on the architecture, the roadmap, and the culture. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own and ship core infrastructure spanning query execution, the graph storage layer, and distributed systems. - Make architecture decisions with long-term product impact alongside the founding team. - Contribute to benchmark and research work that defines the category. - Participate in architecture reviews and navigate hard technical trade-offs with real production consequences. - Help raise the technical ceiling as the team grows. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 3+ years of relevant engineering experience with strong CS fundamentals — the kind where you reason from first principles. - Proficiency in Rust or Go, with hands-on experience building distributed systems (dealbreaker). - Experience designing and shipping core infrastructure components — query engines, storage layers, or graph internals — in a production environment (dealbreaker). - Comfort owning large, ambiguous problems without a playbook and an ownership mindset that extends to design docs and architecture decisions. - Track record of shipping production systems under real load. - Nice to have: experience building or scaling databases or storage infrastructure; open-source contributions in systems-level projects; prior founding engineer or early-stage infrastructure background. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS Salary range: $160,000 – $270,000 USD annually, plus meaningful equity. Learning budget, flexible PTO, and wellness perks included. Visa sponsorship is not available. LOCATION On-site in San Francisco, CA, United States.