Founding Engineer (San Francisco, CA)

Every company has applications it fundamentally cannot secure. They buy Okta or Entra and can only secure a portion of their team's accounts - often leaving out the most critical ones: banking portals, privileged service accounts, social media. Aglide means they can finally secure all of them.

We've raised over $3.5M to go after this problem, with several years of runway in the bank. Household-name fintechs and global enterprises run mission-critical workflows on our platform every day, for thousands of users.

As a founding engineer, you'll own problems end to end - meeting the customer, diagnosing the issue, designing the fix and shipping it to production, sometimes inside a week.

What we do

Aglide combines an on-device browser agent and a browser extension to autonomously run tasks inside our customers' work applications. Our platform lets non-technical users configure these workflows for any application, making setup self-service. Today, it's used for two key workflows:

• User login: Automating user sign-in to work accounts, to give security teams visibility and access policy enforcement.

• Lifecycle: Completing admin tasks inside applications, such as creating or removing users - saving time, reducing human error and tightening access control.

Our customers range from decacorn financial services scale-ups to public insurance companies. Their employees use Aglide to reach the applications they can't work without, from everyday SaaS to corporate bank accounts. Their security teams use it to stay compliant and keep attackers out - including, at times, state-sponsored ones.

Who you'd work with

We're a team of six across London and San Francisco, led by two founders who both still build and sell the product themselves:

• Patrick McGuckian (CEO): Focused on growth, talking to security and GRC teams every week.

• Oliver Colebourne (CTO): Focused on product, making sure customer rollout is a success.

We met at Imperial College London and worked on nearly every university project together. In our final year we decided to take our master's projects further and start a company - after a few pivots, that became Aglide, and we got into YC in summer 2023.

The role

There are few established best practices for browser-using agents, because almost nobody is deploying them at scale. So a fair amount of the job is inventing the playbook - and you'll shape what we build next through the problems you choose to pick up.

What you'll build

Six things, all of them core:

• Browser automation engine: The core of it. Make it hold up on messier sites and handle more complex tasks.

• On-device browser environment: The local environment the agent runs in, on someone’s laptop - reliable and secure.

• Workflow builder: Make a new automation quicker to build, by people who don’t write code.

• Distributed tasks system: Tasks like adding a user, or regularly rotating a password, must run asynchronously on end-user devices.

• Platform controls and analytics: Give customers more control and visibility over when and how their automations run.

• End-to-end encrypted infrastructure: Strengthen and scale the systems keeping customer data encrypted end to end.

How we build

Worth knowing before you apply - this isn't for everyone.

• Full ownership: Significant autonomy. No approval chains to sit behind, and the roadmap moves with what you take on.

• In front of customers: You’ll meet them regularly - understanding what they want, checking your fix landed, and walking them through what you shipped.

• Across the stack: Dashboard, desktop app, backend services, IaC config. Whatever the problem needs.

• Problem to production in days: That pace is the point of a founding role. It occasionally means long nights and weekends.

Unlimited PTO sits alongside that, and we will push you to take it - the intensity only holds up if you're rested.

What we're looking for

Four things we need. The rest you can pick up here.

• 1+ years shipping production software: Built things real users depend on, not just coursework or prototypes.

• Debugging and systems thinking: Browser automation is messy, and our workflows run on end-user devices with end-to-end encrypted data.

• Wanting customer contact: Understanding their problems, validating your fix, spotting the product opportunity in a question.

• Wanting the ownership: Comfortable being the one person responsible from first call to production.

Nice to haves: TypeScript and Postgres; Electron; Browser extensions; Puppeteer or Selenium; Zero-trust and end-to-end encryption; Okta, 1Password, Entra ID, JAMF

What we offer

• Salary and equity: $150,000-$180,000 depending on experience, plus meaningful equity in what we’re building.

• San Francisco office: We’re based in North Waterfront. We prefer to go in most days.

• Medical, dental and vision: We cover 75% of your premiums on our base plan.

• 401(k): with a 3% company match.

• Learning budget: An annual budget for whatever you need to get better at this.

• Unlimited PTO: We’ll make sure you take enough of it to sustain the pace.

• Relocation or travel: The opportunity to travel between SF and London, or relocate in the future if you’d rather.

• Socials and offsites: Frequent dinners and socials, plus an annual international offsite.

We believe the best building happens shoulder-to-shoulder, in office. That said, we trust people to manage their own lives - flexibility isn't a problem when it's needed.

You’ll need existing authorisation to work in the US - we aren’t able to sponsor visas.

Aglide is an equal opportunity employer and doesn't discriminate on the basis of race, colour, religion, gender, national origin, sexual orientation or gender identity.

• 2x Founder intros: A relaxed chat with the founders - a mutual vibe check that lets you learn how we think and work, and helps us understand how you operate and what you want to build next.

• Technical interview: A longer session with an engineer, focused on how you think, debug, and approach the kinds of problems we solve. Here, we care far more about how you think than about “perfect answers.”

• Paid, in-person trial: Spend a day (or, if you’re employed, a weekend) in our office with the team, working on a real Aglide challenge. It’s a chance for both sides to see what it’s like to work together.

• Offer

Given the volume of applications, we can’t provide detailed feedback to everyone. However, if you interview with us and we decide not to move forward, we’ll let you know within 24 hours.