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 deploys AI agents at scale for businesses. You'll operate with CTO-level ownership — taking vague problems from user insight all the way to production — and directly shape both the product and the company's trajectory. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own large parts of the product end-to-end, from user insight 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 agent architectures. - Talk directly to users, understand their pain points, and scope features that solve real problems. - Ship full-stack when needed, including Go backend and Vite/TypeScript frontend work. - Champion AI-first development practices — coding agents, automation — and scale yourself through them. - Review code quickly while maintaining high standards across the codebase. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - Proven ability to own features end-to-end from ideation to production with minimal hand-holding. - Hands-on experience designing and deploying AI-driven systems, including agent architectures, context engineering, and tool use. - Experience ensuring production readiness of AI systems — monitoring, observability, performance tuning, and reliability. - Strong proficiency in Go and care for clean, maintainable code; comfortable going full-stack in TypeScript/Vite when needed. - Deep product sense with a track record of building for user outcomes rather than engineering's sake. - Comfort — and enthusiasm — for ambiguity; you don't need a PM to tell you what to build. - Experience building something from scratch (a startup, a meaningful side project, a shipped feature). - Familiarity with modern AI coding paradigms (e.g. coding agents, AI-assisted development tools). - Background in AI research or experience at an AI product/coding startup is a plus. - US work authorization required — visa sponsorship is not available. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS - Salary: $120,000 – $250,000 USD annually - Generous equity commensurate with a founding-level role - Visa sponsorship: not available LOCATION On-site in San Francisco, California, USA.