Founding Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Employment Type: FullTime

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.