Founding Engineer - Product (Staff)
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Sep 26, 2026. First seen by Alion on Sep 25, 2026.
Ardent is building data infrastructure scaled for agents on a new primitive: branching. Our first product lets developers and agents clone TB-scale Postgres DBs in under 6s, so coding agents can test their work against a 1:1 copy of prod.
Vikram started the company after scaling an AI Data Engineer to $200K in ARR and realizing the agents couldn't test any generated code without fast, cheap, scalable clones of production state. Our CTO Evan saw the same problem across 20 years in data at Netflix, Mailchimp, and Capital One.
We solve hard problems: compute scaling, storage branching, merges, and reliability at scale. We want to build the most efficient sandboxing layer for agents on data infrastructure in the world, across every data system.
We're growing fast and backed by top investors including YC, Crane, Active Capital, and the founders of core data infrastructure companies like Atlan.
About the role:
We're a small SF-based team looking to hire a strong founding product engineer. You'll work across the stack, from Postgres compute scaling to the workflows and UX our customers and their agents use every day, and you'll work directly with customers to shape the product from its earliest stages. This is a challenging role where you'll work across the stack on everything from low level go bugs to UX changes to deliver value to our customers.
What you should expect, with example tasks:
- In your first 30 days, rebuild onboarding end to end so a new customer gets from signup to a branch of their own production database in under 10 minutes, on their own cloud, without us on a call
- Build the agent interface for branching across MCP, API, and SDKs, so a coding agent can create a branch, test against it, and tear it down with no human in the loop for every provider we support
- Design and ship the backend infrastructure to handle branch state at scale: millions of branches a month
- Own the connection experience. Any stock Postgres client, no special driver handling, just a connection string that works
What we're looking for:
- Strong fundamentals in computer science and architecture design
- Comfortable working across the stack and wearing many hats
- Deeply interested in what developer tools look like when the user is an agent, not a person
- Past experience shipping developer-facing products fast and a familiarity with go and Postgres
- Taste. You should be able to look at a flow and know it's wrong before a customer tells you
- Strong beliefs, loosely held
- We work 5-6 days/week