Founding Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Compensation: $140K – $225K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

About Brainbase

Brainbase is to AI Employees what Retool is to internal tools.

We envision a future where every company has an AI workforce working alongside their human team. Brainbase enables businesses to create those AI Employees.

In just one year, we’ve grown to $XM+ ARR and are on track to hit $XXM+ next. Our customers range from SMBs to Fortune 50 enterprises. We’re backed by Y Combinator, 500 Global, and other top-tier firms, with participation from the founders of YouTube and HubSpot, as well as leading YC alumni.

About the role

As part of our founding team, you will have a high agency role in bringing AI to the enterprise: shipping new features, talking to users and shaping company culture for other team members to come.

You will work one-on-one with our CEO and founding team to primarily iterate based on customer feedback, help with infrastructure scaling (cloud and on-premise) and improve our underlying proprietary agent system.

Who’s a good fit?

We think you should apply if the following sounds like you:

• Resourceful – You’ve been known to get a lot done with very little, whether it is time, money or compute

• Resilient – You don’t quit when something is difficult, only when you have realized a better way to do it

• Decisive – You can make informed decisions under stress with incomplete data, and move on to the next task (no hedging)

• L̶i̶k̶e̶ Love difficult problems – You like working at puzzles, chess or anything that you’re not immediately good at

• Fun – You can smile/joke/enjoy yourself through the pain and the slog, and can lift up others even when things are objectively not going well

What we’re looking for?

In addition to the personal qualities mentioned above, this role requires the following:

💻 Must haves

• In SF, or willing to relocate

• US work permit (we do not currently sponsor H1-Bs, OPTs are fine)

• 2+ years of software engineering experience (new grads encouraged since pet projects count)

• Excellence with Typescript & Python

• Some experience with LLMs (OpenAI API, Langchain, HuggingFace, etc.)

• Demonstration of autonomy and entrepreneurial spirit (side projects, previous companies)

💻 Good to haves

• Proficiency in AWS, cloud deployment, CI/CD

• Usage of React 19 + Next.js 15

• Experience with ORMs (Prisma, Drizzle, etc)

• Strong foundational understanding of communications protocols (HTTP, WebRTC, WebSockets) and telephony systems

• Experience with micro-service based architecture & building robust, flexible systems

• Machine learning research experience

• Previous startup experience

NSFABIQ - Not So Frequently Asked But Important Questions

• 🧠 Why should I join Brainbase and not start my own startup?

  If you’re accepted into our team, there is no question that we believe you’re capable of running your company. In fact you can be sure that we have all the faith in you that you’ll probably start your own unicorn at some point. But startups are (famously) hard, and it’s usually good practice to see how a good one is run before you start your own. This is truer than ever with the current AI boom, where you really want to see what sets a great AI company from a mediocre one.

  As a founding member of our team, you’ll get to experience all the great parts of being a founder (autonomy, talking to customers, shipping, culture creation) without any of the overhead (fundraising, operations, taxes). In the end, if you choose to leave to start your own journey, we’ll do everything we can to support you.

• 🧠 I’d like to join, but I don’t think I’m founding engineer material

  If you’re in doubt, and satisfy the Must Have’s from above, you should apply. We love having exceptional people join our team in any capacity and we might end up seeing something in you that you don’t yet yourself.

• 🧠 What’s the application process like?

  We vary the application process based on what we can already gather from your resume and previous experiences but you should expect (1) a screening phone call, (2) technical screen (take home or over Zoom) and (3) paid trial for a week at the offices.