Founding Engineer-Vindexa

Team: AI Fund

Location: Santa Monica, CA

Commitment: Full time

Workplace Type: hybrid

Vindexa is an AI-powered compliance platform purpose-built for the clean energy industry. We automate the verification of Prevailing Wage and Apprenticeship (PWA) requirements under the Inflation Reduction Act -- the compliance obligations that determine whether renewable energy developers keep or lose their IRA tax credits.

The stakes are real. A single construction project can carry $50M+ in tax credit exposure. Developers, EPC contractors, and their tax equity partners need certainty that compliance holds up to IRS scrutiny in real time, not months after the fact.

We built the alternative: an AI system that ingests certified payroll data, validates it against DOL wage determinations and apprenticeship program requirements, surfaces violations in real time, and generates the audit trail needed for tax credit certification.

Vindexa is backed by AI Fund (Andrew Ng) and AES Clean Energy, one of the largest renewable energy developers in the world, as our anchor design partner and early customer. The product is built, the first customer relationship is deep, and the pipeline is building. Now we need the engineering foundation to match the ambition.

The Role

You will be Vindexa's first engineering hire and the technical backbone of the company. This is not a role where you execute someone else's tickets. You will make architectural decisions, set engineering standards, own the codebase, and build the AI-powered workflows that make our compliance engine genuinely better than anything else in the market.

You will work directly alongside our CEO, who is technical and actively involved in product and engineering, and operate with significant autonomy. We move fast using AI coding tools and agents as force multipliers, not crutches. The expectation is that you are already building this way and can push the pace further.

As we scale, this role grows with it. You are not just the first engineer -- you are the future engineering leader.

What You Will Do

Own the Product Engineering

• Architect, build, and ship full-stack features across our React/TypeScript frontend and Supabase/PostgreSQL backend.
• Write production-quality code while moving at startup speed, using AI coding tools to dramatically compress the time between idea and shipped feature.
• Make and defend architectural decisions: data modeling, API design, security, performance, scalability.
• Maintain code quality, testing standards, and documentation without being told to.

Build AI Agents and Automation Workflows

• Design and implement AI agents and multi-step automation pipelines that power our compliance engine: document ingestion, payroll validation, issue detection, remediation workflows.
• Work with LLMs (currently Google Gemini and Claude) to build intelligent extraction, classification, and validation systems.
• Build robust, observable, production-grade AI workflows with proper error handling, retry logic, audit trails, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints.
• Stay current on the evolving AI engineering landscape and bring in the right tools as they mature.

Be the Engineering Standard

• Establish patterns and practices that will scale as we grow the team.
• Own security rigorously: data handling (PII, SSNs, payroll data), authentication, authorization, and audit logging are core to our value proposition.
• Instrument the system: logging, monitoring, error tracking, performance.
• Eventually recruit, mentor, and lead additional engineers as the team grows.

What We Are Looking For

Non-Negotiables

• Genuinely AI-native engineer: you live in Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, or equivalent. AI tooling is how you build, not a novelty.
• Strong full-stack capability: React/TypeScript on the frontend, Node/TypeScript or equivalent on the backend, comfortable in SQL and relational data modeling.
• Experience building AI agents and automation workflows in production -- not toy demos, but systems with real users and real consequences.
• Architectural judgment: you know when to move fast and when to slow down, when to abstract and when to hardcode, when to build and when to buy.
• Security-minded by default. Our customers share payroll data, SSNs, and financial records.
• Independent operator who needs direction on priorities, not on how to execute.

Strong Signals

• Experience with Supabase, PostgreSQL, and serverless/edge function architectures (Deno a plus).
• Demonstrated history of shipping meaningful software at startup pace.
• Experience with document processing pipelines: parsing PDFs, Excel, Word documents; working with structured and unstructured data.
• Comfort working in a domain you do not initially know deeply. Compliance and regulatory logic is learnable; the engineering fundamentals are not.
• Excitement about the clean energy transition.

What This Is Not

• A role for someone who needs heavy direction or structured processes to be productive.
• A purely frontend or purely backend position. You own the whole stack.
• A role where you hand off AI work to a separate ML team. You build and own it.
• A large-company engineering environment. We move fast, context switches happen, and the best solution is the one we can ship.

The Current Stack and Compensation

The Current Stack

Frontend: React 18, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui, React Query, React Hook Form

Backend: Supabase (PostgreSQL, Auth, Storage, Edge Functions), Deno runtime, TypeScript

AI / Agents: Google Gemini (extraction, classification, chat), Claude API, custom Edge Function agents

Tooling: Cursor / AI coding agents, Vercel (frontend deploy), Resend (email), Linear (PM), GitHub

Testing: Vitest, React Testing Library, pgTAP (database)

The stack matters less than the mindset. If you have strong opinions about different approaches, bring them.

You are joining a pre-seed company with real customers, real revenue on the horizon, and meaningful equity upside. Standard 4-year vesting with a 1-year cliff. We will work with you on comparable acceleration protections.

Why This Role, Why Now

• Engineering hire #1 at a company with a real product, a named anchor customer (AES Clean Energy), and a clear path to revenue.
• The problem is genuinely important: IRA tax credits fund the energy transition, and we are the infrastructure that makes sure those credits hold.
• Broad, interesting technical surface area: AI agents, document processing, compliance logic, real-time validation, audit trails, contractor-facing portal, developer-facing analytics layer.
• Real ownership over the codebase, architectural decisions, and the engineering culture you help create.
• The CEO is technical and will be a genuine engineering partner.
• Santa Monica office. We are building a team in LA.