Founding Engineer

Role details

ABOUT THE ROLE A YC-backed enterprise AI SaaS startup is looking for a Founding Engineer to join their small, high-output team in San Francisco. The company is building an agentic operating system for the enterprise, with thousands of agents already deployed at scale-up startups and enterprise companies. They have strong product-market fit and are growing revenue rapidly month-over-month. This is a founding-level role with CTO-level expectations. You'll take vague problems, scope them, build them end-to-end, and ship things that create real value — with no hand-holding and no waiting for specs. You need to be a full-stack engineer, an AI engineer, and a product engineer rolled into one. Former founders are especially encouraged to apply. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own large parts of the product end-to-end — from user insight all the way to production - Build and continuously improve agentic systems: accuracy, reliability, and capability - Work at the frontier of AI engineering — context engineering, tool use, agent architectures - Talk to users, understand their pain points, and scope features that genuinely solve problems - Ship full-stack when needed (Go backend, Vite + React + TypeScript frontend) - Champion AI-first development practices — coding agents, automation, and self-scaling workflows - Review code quickly while maintaining high standards across the codebase WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR Must-haves (dealbreakers): - Proven production experience building backend services in Go (Golang) - Authorized to work in the United States without visa sponsorship Required skills: - Experience building frontend applications with React and TypeScript - Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, deployment workflows, and production monitoring/observability - Experience building and consuming REST and/or gRPC APIs in microservices architectures - 0–3 years of professional software engineering experience (full-stack or equivalent) Strong pluses: - Prior startup experience or time as a founding/early engineer - Experience building AI-driven products — agentic systems, LLMs, prompt engineering, or agent orchestration - Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or equivalent) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) - Experience with relational (Postgres/MySQL) and NoSQL databases - AI research background or experience at an AI coding or tooling startup - Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience You'll thrive here if you: - Have razor-sharp problem-solving instincts and move fast without sacrificing quality - Love Go and care about clean, maintainable code - Are obsessed with AI-first development tools (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, coding agents) - Thrive in ambiguity — you don't need a PM to tell you what to build - Have built something from scratch before: a startup, a side project, or a feature that shipped and mattered COMPENSATION & BENEFITS - Salary: $120,000 – $250,000 USD annually - Generous equity reflecting the outsized impact of this founding role - Unlimited AI tooling budget - A true seat at the table — you'll shape the product and the company's direction LOCATION This role is on-site in San Francisco, CA. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States. Visa sponsorship is not available.