Founding Engineer
About the Role
This is the second engineering hire at an early-stage AI SaaS startup building intelligent agents for industrial ingredient manufacturers, a massive legacy industry ripe for automation. You will work directly alongside the founders on every major product and technical decision, owning work across the full stack as the company scales from zero.
What You'll Do
Build backend systems that ingest and process messy real-world documents from customer ERPs and inboxes, including large-scale PDF pipelines.
Develop LLM-powered agents that complete complex, multi-page compliance and food safety documents end to end.
Own features across the entire stack, from backend services through to the UI, without waiting for a specialist.
Ship fast, get features in front of real users, and iterate on direct feedback rather than prolonged architecture debates.
Contribute to foundational technical and product decisions alongside a small, high-context founding team.
What We're Looking For
A proven builder: you have shipped products or major features that real users actively used, and you can speak clearly to the tradeoffs you made and what you would do differently.
Full-stack range: comfortable taking a feature from backend service through to a polished UI without needing a specialist for each layer.
Production LLM and agent experience: you have built and shipped LLM-powered features or autonomous agents in production, not just prototypes or demos.
Strong backend fundamentals: services that ingest and process unstructured or messy real-world data, plus solid relational schema design (Postgres or equivalent).
Experience integrating multiple model providers (e.g. Gemini, Anthropic, OpenAI) into production systems.
Familiarity with document processing, PDF parsing, or unstructured data extraction is a strong plus.
Stack: Kotlin and Spring Boot on the backend (or another JVM language you can transfer from), React and Next.js on the frontend, Postgres, GCP or equivalent cloud.
Early-startup or founding engineer experience, or a strong personal track record of building things independently; high drive and appetite for ambiguity matter more than pedigree or tenure.
No degree or years-of-experience requirement. What you have shipped and how you think are what count.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary: $200,000 to $300,000 per year
Equity: 0.5% to 2.0%
Visa sponsorship: Not available
Location
Fully on-site, five days a week in San Francisco, CA. Candidates must be based in the San Francisco Bay Area or clearly willing to relocate.