Founding Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Employment Type: FullTime

About the Role

A well-funded, seed-stage startup building graph-native context and memory infrastructure for AI agents is hiring 2–3 Founding Engineers to work on the core platform. This is not a feature factory role. You will own significant pieces of the system — query engine, storage layer, graph internals — and make architecture decisions that will shape the product for the next decade. You'll work directly with the founding team, and your name will be on the design docs and the pull requests in the same week.

The company builds a GraphDB on object storage, purpose-built for modern AI workloads. The platform delivers precise, structured, and temporally-aware context to AI agents via a tiered storage architecture (in-memory, NVMe SSD, object storage), semantic search, git-style temporal versioning, and entity resolution. The company is backed by prominent investors and researchers in AI and infrastructure and has reached Series A/B-equivalent seed funding.

What You'll Do

• Own and ship core infrastructure: query execution engine, graph storage layer, and distributed systems components

• Make architecture decisions with long-term product impact alongside the founding team

• Contribute to benchmark and research work that defines the technical category

• Participate in architecture reviews and navigate hard technical trade-offs with real production consequences

• Help raise the technical ceiling as the team scales

What We're Looking For

Dealbreakers (must-haves):

• Proficiency in Rust or Go with hands-on experience building distributed systems

• Experience designing and shipping core infrastructure components — query engine, storage layer, or graph internals — in a production environment

Required:

• Strong CS fundamentals: ability to reason from first principles, not just frameworks

• 3+ years of relevant engineering experience

• Comfortable owning large, ambiguous problems without a playbook

• Track record of shipping production systems that real customers depend on under load

• Ownership mindset — ready to contribute to design docs and architecture decisions from day one

Nice to Have:

• Experience building or scaling distributed databases or storage infrastructure

• Open source contributions in systems-level projects

• IIT or Recurse Center background

• Prior founding engineer or early-stage infrastructure role

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $160,000 – $270,000 USD annually

• Equity: Meaningful equity stake — the company strongly values builders owning a real piece of what they create

• Wellness programs and free daily meals in-office

• Top-tier hardware and software setup

• Flexible PTO optimized for deep, focused work

• Learning budget covering books, courses, conferences, and compute for personal experiments

• Periodic team offsites

• Visa sponsorship: Not available

Location

This role is on-site in San Francisco, CA. The team works in-person and values direct, high-bandwidth collaboration.