Founding Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Sep 25, 2026. First seen by Alion on Sep 24, 2026. Clera scores B on the Alion truth index.
About the Role
You'll join a small founding engineering team as an early hire, working directly with the founders on every major decision at an AI-native B2B SaaS startup serving industrial ingredient manufacturers. The product spans document ingestion, LLM agents, and compliance workflows, and your work will touch everything from backend pipelines to user-facing interfaces.
What You'll Do
Build backend systems that ingest and process messy real-world documents from customer ERPs and inboxes.
Develop LLM agents that complete complex, multi-page compliance and food safety documents.
Own features end to end across the full stack, picking up whatever the company needs next.
Ship fast and iterate directly on real user feedback rather than extended architecture debate.
Work daily alongside the founding team on product direction, technical decisions, and company strategy.
What We're Looking For
Prior experience as a founding engineer, founder, or early engineering hire (first 1 to 5 engineers) at a seed or Series A startup.
Clear 0-to-1 ownership: you have built and shipped production products or major features end to end, not primarily maintained existing systems.
Full-stack range, able to take a feature from backend service through to the UI without waiting for a specialist.
Strong backend engineering: services that ingest and process real-world data, plus relational schema design (Postgres or equivalent).
LLM and agent work that has run in production, not just demos or experiments.
A high career slope: each role shows increasing ownership, scope, and impact.
Huge drive and genuine appetite for the ambiguous, hands-on early-startup path.
Based in the San Francisco Bay Area or clearly willing to relocate.
Familiarity with a JVM backend (Kotlin and Spring Boot preferred, but strong engineers on other stacks are expected to pick it up), React and Next.js on the frontend, Postgres, and a major cloud provider (GCP, AWS, or Azure).
Experience integrating multiple model providers (such as Gemini, Anthropic, or OpenAI) into production systems is a plus.
Side projects, open-source work, or independently launched products are a strong signal.
No degree or years-of-experience requirement.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary: $200,000 to $300,000 annually. Equity: 0.5% to 2.0%. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
Fully on-site, five days a week in San Francisco, California.