Founding Engineer
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.