Founding Engineer
About the Role
This is a core infrastructure engineering role at an early-stage, graph-native database company building memory and context infrastructure for AI agents. You will own significant parts of the platform, including the query engine, storage layer, and graph internals, and make architecture decisions that shape the product for years to come. The team is small, moves fast, and every engineer has direct influence on the roadmap and culture.
What You'll Do
Own and ship core infrastructure components: query execution, graph storage layer, and distributed systems.
Make architecture decisions with long-term product impact alongside the founding team.
Contribute to benchmark and research work that defines the technical direction of the platform.
Participate in architecture reviews and work through hard technical trade-offs with real production consequences.
Help raise the technical ceiling as the engineering team grows.
What We're Looking For
At least 3 years of relevant engineering experience.
Proficiency in Rust or Go, or a strong drive to go deep in one of them.
Hands-on experience designing and shipping core infrastructure such as query engines, storage layers, or graph internals in production.
Strong computer science fundamentals with the ability to reason from first principles, not just frameworks.
Comfort owning large, ambiguous problems and operating with an ownership mindset.
Experience building or scaling distributed systems, databases, or storage infrastructure is a strong plus.
Open-source contributions to systems-level projects are a bonus.
Prior founding engineer or early-stage infrastructure experience is a plus.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary: $160,000 to $270,000 USD annually, plus meaningful equity. The company wants builders to own a real piece of what they create. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
On-site in San Francisco, CA, United States.