{"id":125740,"url":"https://alion.io/job/career-founding-engineer-vindexa","title":"Founding Engineer-Vindexa","company":{"id":27001,"name":"AI Fund","domain":"aifund.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/aifund","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":true,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Lever","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":87,"open_postings":43,"ghost_share":0.14,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":88,"computed_at":"2026-10-17T05:46:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Santa Monica, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":139000,"max_usd":294000,"period":"year","method":"role_country_seniority_unknown","sample_n":8485},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Claude","optional":false},{"name":"Claude Code","optional":false},{"name":"Cursor","optional":false},{"name":"Gemini","optional":false},{"name":"GitHub","optional":false},{"name":"Human-in-the-Loop","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"React Hook Form","optional":false},{"name":"React Query","optional":false},{"name":"React.js","optional":false},{"name":"shadcn/ui","optional":false},{"name":"SQL","optional":false},{"name":"Supabase","optional":false},{"name":"Tailwind CSS","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"Vercel","optional":false},{"name":"Vite","optional":false},{"name":"Vitest","optional":false},{"name":"Windsurf","optional":false},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true},{"name":"Radix UI","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-03-24T22:33:39Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-03-24","last_verified_at":"2026-10-18T00:12:20Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":207,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":["company_stale"],"days_open":206},"description":"Vindexa is an AI-powered compliance platform purpose-built for the clean energy industry. We automate the verification of Prevailing Wage and Apprenticeship (PWA) requirements under the Inflation Reduction Act -- the compliance obligations that determine whether renewable energy developers keep or lose their IRA tax credits.\nThe stakes are real. A single construction project can carry $50M+ in tax credit exposure. Developers, EPC contractors, and their tax equity partners need certainty that compliance holds up to IRS scrutiny in real time, not months after the fact.\nWe built the alternative: an AI system that ingests certified payroll data, validates it against DOL wage determinations and apprenticeship program requirements, surfaces violations in real time, and generates the audit trail needed for tax credit certification.\nVindexa is backed by AI Fund (Andrew Ng) and AES Clean Energy, one of the largest renewable energy developers in the world, as our anchor design partner and early customer. The product is built, the first customer relationship is deep, and the pipeline is building. Now we need the engineering foundation to match the ambition.\nThe Role\nYou will be Vindexa's first engineering hire and the technical backbone of the company. This is not a role where you execute someone else's tickets. You will make architectural decisions, set engineering standards, own the codebase, and build the AI-powered workflows that make our compliance engine genuinely better than anything else in the market.\nYou will work directly alongside our CEO, who is technical and actively involved in product and engineering, and operate with significant autonomy. We move fast using AI coding tools and agents as force multipliers, not crutches. The expectation is that you are already building this way and can push the pace further.\nAs we scale, this role grows with it. You are not just the first engineer -- you are the future engineering leader.\nWhat You Will Do\nOwn the Product Engineering\nArchitect, build, and ship full-stack features across our React/TypeScript frontend and Supabase/PostgreSQL backend.\nWrite production-quality code while moving at startup speed, using AI coding tools to dramatically compress the time between idea and shipped feature.\nMake and defend architectural decisions: data modeling, API design, security, performance, scalability.\nMaintain code quality, testing standards, and documentation without being told to.\nBuild AI Agents and Automation Workflows\nDesign and implement AI agents and multi-step automation pipelines that power our compliance engine: document ingestion, payroll validation, issue detection, remediation workflows.\nWork with LLMs (currently Google Gemini and Claude) to build intelligent extraction, classification, and validation systems.\nBuild robust, observable, production-grade AI workflows with proper error handling, retry logic, audit trails, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints.\nStay current on the evolving AI engineering landscape and bring in the right tools as they mature.\nBe the Engineering Standard\nEstablish patterns and practices that will scale as we grow the team.\nOwn security rigorously: data handling (PII, SSNs, payroll data), authentication, authorization, and audit logging are core to our value proposition.\nInstrument the system: logging, monitoring, error tracking, performance.\nEventually recruit, mentor, and lead additional engineers as the team grows.\nWhat We Are Looking For\nNon-Negotiables\nGenuinely AI-native engineer: you live in Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, or equivalent. AI tooling is how you build, not a novelty.\nStrong full-stack capability: React/TypeScript on the frontend, Node/TypeScript or equivalent on the backend, comfortable in SQL and relational data modeling.\nExperience building AI agents and automation workflows in production -- not toy demos, but systems with real users and real consequences.\nArchitectural judgment: you know when to move fast and when to slow down, when to abstract and when to hardcode, when to build and when to buy.\nSecurity-minded by default. Our customers share payroll data, SSNs, and financial records.\nIndependent operator who needs direction on priorities, not on how to execute.\nStrong Signals\nExperience with Supabase, PostgreSQL, and serverless/edge function architectures (Deno a plus).\nDemonstrated history of shipping meaningful software at startup pace.\nExperience with document processing pipelines: parsing PDFs, Excel, Word documents; working with structured and unstructured data.\nComfort working in a domain you do not initially know deeply. Compliance and regulatory logic is learnable; the engineering fundamentals are not.\nExcitement about the clean energy transition.\nWhat This Is Not\nA role for someone who needs heavy direction or structured processes to be productive.\nA purely frontend or purely backend position. You own the whole stack.\nA role where you hand off AI work to a separate ML team. You build and own it.\nA large-company engineering environment. We move fast, context switches happen, and the best solution is the one we can ship.\nThe Current Stack and Compensation\nThe Current Stack\nFrontend: React 18, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui, React Query, React Hook Form\nBackend: Supabase (PostgreSQL, Auth, Storage, Edge Functions), Deno runtime, TypeScript\nAI / Agents: Google Gemini (extraction, classification, chat), Claude API, custom Edge Function agents\nTooling: Cursor / AI coding agents, Vercel (frontend deploy), Resend (email), Linear (PM), GitHub\nTesting: Vitest, React Testing Library, pgTAP (database)\nThe stack matters less than the mindset. If you have strong opinions about different approaches, bring them.\nYou are joining a pre-seed company with real customers, real revenue on the horizon, and meaningful equity upside. Standard 4-year vesting with a 1-year cliff. We will work with you on comparable acceleration protections.\nWhy This Role, Why Now\nEngineering hire #1 at a company with a real product, a named anchor customer (AES Clean Energy), and a clear path to revenue.\nThe problem is genuinely important: IRA tax credits fund the energy transition, and we are the infrastructure that makes sure those credits hold.\nBroad, interesting technical surface area: AI agents, document processing, compliance logic, real-time validation, audit trails, contractor-facing portal, developer-facing analytics layer.\nReal ownership over the codebase, architectural decisions, and the engineering culture you help create.\nThe CEO is technical and will be a genuine engineering partner.\nSanta Monica office. 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