Founding Engineer

Role details

ABOUT THE ROLE This is the first full-time engineering hire outside the founding team at an early-stage AI/ML startup building tools that automatically detect failures in agent conversations and generate the patches to fix them. You'll own the entire loop — from data ingestion through patch generation and verification — and set the engineering culture everyone who comes after you will inherit. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Ship end-to-end: take problems from failure detection through ingest, patch generation, and verification into a product customers actively use. - Own the trust surface — reproduction logic, guardrails, and checks that prevent bad PRs from reaching customer repositories. - Move from customer conversation to shipped solution without waiting for formal specs or sign-off. - Work directly with customers: read their traces, join their channels, and surface what broke before anyone else does. - Make architectural calls that last — schema design, service boundaries, and speed-vs-correctness tradeoffs. - Define engineering culture from scratch: testing standards, on-call practices, and ship criteria. - Work across the full system — some weeks detection quality, some weeks the ingest pipeline, some weeks the review UI. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 3+ years shipping production software with a demonstrated track record of working effectively outside your core specialty. - Strong TypeScript proficiency across the full stack, from frontend through core services — it's the entire codebase. - Real comfort with high-volume data: you think in cost-per-event, not just correctness. - Experience building and operating AI agents in production, with clear opinions on how and why they fail. - Experience designing data pipelines and optimizing systems for scale and cost awareness. - Ability to take ambiguous customer problems and return well-considered solutions independently. - Experience with observability, monitoring, and debugging production systems. - Strong product sense — comfortable making architectural decisions with long-term system impact. - Bonus: experience with PR review automation, code quality tooling, or early-stage founding team environments. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS Salary range: $150,000 – $200,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is available. LOCATION On-site in San Francisco, CA, United States.