Founding Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: San Francisco

Employment Type: FullTime

About the Role

This is a founding engineering role at a YC-backed enterprise AI startup building an agentic operating system that deploys AI agents at scale for businesses. You'll operate with CTO-level ownership — taking vague problems from user insight all the way to production — and directly shape both the product and the company's trajectory.

What You'll Do

• Own large parts of the product end-to-end, from user insight through to production deployment.

• Build and continuously improve agentic systems, making them more accurate, reliable, and powerful.

• Work at the frontier of AI engineering — context engineering, tool use, and agent architectures.

• Talk directly to users, understand their pain points, and scope features that solve real problems.

• Ship full-stack when needed, including Go backend and Vite/TypeScript frontend work.

• Champion AI-first development practices — coding agents, automation — and scale yourself through them.

• Review code quickly while maintaining high standards across the codebase.

What We're Looking For

• Proven ability to own features end-to-end from ideation to production with minimal hand-holding.

• Hands-on experience designing and deploying AI-driven systems, including agent architectures, context engineering, and tool use.

• Experience ensuring production readiness of AI systems — monitoring, observability, performance tuning, and reliability.

• Strong proficiency in Go and care for clean, maintainable code; comfortable going full-stack in TypeScript/Vite when needed.

• Deep product sense with a track record of building for user outcomes rather than engineering's sake.

• Comfort — and enthusiasm — for ambiguity; you don't need a PM to tell you what to build.

• Experience building something from scratch (a startup, a meaningful side project, a shipped feature).

• Familiarity with modern AI coding paradigms (e.g. coding agents, AI-assisted development tools).

• Background in AI research or experience at an AI product/coding startup is a plus.

• US work authorization required — visa sponsorship is not available.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $120,000 – $250,000 USD annually

• Generous equity commensurate with a founding-level role

• Visa sponsorship: not available

Location

On-site in San Francisco, California, USA.