Founding Engineer
About the Role
This is the first engineering hire at a freshly funded, solo-founded startup building the infrastructure layer for AI-native service companies. You will work directly with the founder to take a working agentic product and scale it into production infrastructure that can support a million users. If you are the right person, this grows into a CTO seat, with title following the work.
What You'll Do
Rebuild a working product into agentic infrastructure designed to scale to a million users.
Design and own the agent runtime: orchestration, memory, verification, and the machinery that makes an AI workforce reliable.
Own work end to end across backend, infrastructure, frontend, and agent systems, whatever the company needs next.
Set the technical stack, standards, and the way the team builds, as the person defining it from day one.
Ship weekly to real businesses running on the platform today.
What We're Looking For
At least 2 years shipping production software, or an equivalent track record as a founder or solo builder. Exceptional engineers with less time but stronger output are in scope.
Hands-on experience building and running LLM or AI agent systems in production, with real users depending on them. Demos and side experiments do not count.
Full-stack range: able to take work from backend and infrastructure through to the UI without waiting for a specialist.
Proven ability to turn a working prototype into infrastructure that holds real load, covering architecture, data models, runtime, and orchestration.
Experience owning technical decisions with no engineering organisation above you, as a founder, early hire, or solo technical lead.
Comfort with ambiguity, breadth, and a weekly or faster shipping cadence to production users.
Background as a founder or co-founder is a strong positive signal.
Familiarity with agent orchestration, agent memory, evals, verification systems, or multi-agent workflows is a plus.
Strong CS fundamentals from a university or well-known engineering environment are a nice signal, not a gate.
Based in Europe, open to relocating to San Francisco within the first year.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary range: EUR 80,000 to EUR 140,000 annually. Relocation support and US visa sponsorship are provided from day one.
Location
Fully remote within Europe to start. Relocation to San Francisco is expected within the first year, with visa sponsorship and relocation assistance provided.