Founding Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Sep 27, 2026. First seen by Alion on Sep 26, 2026. Clera scores B on the Alion truth index.
About the Role
This is the first full-time engineering hire outside the founding team at an early-stage AI developer tooling startup. You will own the entire loop from ingesting agent conversation data through automated patch generation and verification, building the infrastructure that helps engineering teams catch and fix failures their existing processes miss. The work you do here sets the technical and cultural standards for every engineer who follows.
What You'll Do
Ship end-to-end features spanning ingest pipelines, detection systems, patch generation, verification, and the user-facing product.
Own the trust surface, including reproduction logic, guardrails, and checks that prevent bad PRs from reaching customer repositories.
Move from customer problem to shipped solution independently, without waiting for formal specs or sign-off.
Engage directly with customers: read their traces, join their communication channels, and surface issues proactively.
Make lasting architectural decisions covering schema design, service boundaries, and speed-versus-correctness tradeoffs.
Define engineering culture from the ground up, including testing standards, on-call practices, and release criteria.
What We're Looking For
3+ years shipping production software with a demonstrated ability to work effectively outside a single specialty.
Strong TypeScript proficiency across the full stack, from frontend through core services (the entire codebase is TypeScript).
Real comfort working with high-volume event data, with cost-per-event thinking alongside correctness.
Experience designing and optimizing data pipelines and production systems with observability and monitoring in mind.
Hands-on experience building and operating AI agents in production, with clear opinions on how and why they fail.
Strong product sense: able to take rough, open-ended problems and return well-considered solutions without designs handed to you.
Experience making architectural decisions that shape long-term system design.
Comfortable working directly with customers to understand production failures and requirements.
Bonus: experience with PR review automation, code quality tooling, or early-stage founding team environments.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary range: $150,000 to $200,000 USD annually. Equity is expected given the founding-team-adjacent seniority of the role.
Location
On-site in San Francisco, California. This role requires working from the office six days per week.