Founding Engineer (Platform/Backend)
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Sep 24, 2026. First seen by Alion on Sep 24, 2026.
About Dataleap
The business world is going through a massive transformation right now. The way organizations operate tomorrow will be very different from how the operate today. Humans will set up and control how work is done, inject creativity and steer if necessary. Most of the raw execution will be done by AI. Chatbots are great at automating single-person workflows. The real unlock for organizations starts when team and org wide workflows are automated. At Dataleap we are building the underlying engine for team and org wide workflows. Thousands of our agents are running in production at large enterprise companies every day.
Our values
Intensity
One reason why we started Dataleap is that we want maximum intensity in life. Life is short and we want to live it to the fullest. At a startup there is no brand you can rely on, no other person to do the work for you, it’s just you. Either you figure it out or it doesn’t get done. Intensity doesn’t mean just crazy hours. We operate like athletes who value recovery highly.
Curiosity
Many of the problems we are working on have never been solved before. How can agents collaborate on a deliverable? How can a human supervise 10s of agents without missing important decisions? How can an agent be upgraded to a better version without breaking functionality? Finding the right answers requires a high level of curiosity and playfullness.
Kindness
Intensity only works if the people around you are kind. Otherwise it's just pressure. We push hard on the work and we're careful with each other while doing it. A design can be wrong without the person being wrong.
About the role
We are looking for someone who wants to join us building the foundation of our platform. Since we are a small team every engineer is dealing with a diverse set of challenges. One week, you will dive deep into our agent harness, benchmark it against other public harnesses like pi or codex and ship improvements. In another week you might refactor parts of the Go codebase so it can handle more load. Yet another week you might work on improving the skills, connected tools, linting rules and style guides in our codebase to make code agents work more efficiently.
For the role there are four requirements:
1. High raw intelligence
You have to jump into lots of different topics. Naturally you will not be an expert in all of them. You need to be able to figure things out quickly.
2. Taste for good system design & processes
We leverage coding agents heavily. Especially for a small team like ours it’s very important that everybody has the same high bar for code abstractions, error management and internal processes.
3. Confidence and humility
You will push important updates to production right before a customer pitch or make expensive to revert architecture decisions. For that you need a certain level of confidence. We operate under the principle of “strong opinions, loosely held”. Design decisions get questioned and reverted. Dealing well with criticism and even demanding it is crucial.
4. 2-3 years of system design experience
There is no time for hand holding. You need to know pros and cons of architecture decisions already.
What you get
1. Product you can use & tangible progress
You will work on a product that shapes how organizations of the future will function. You yourself and all your friends can try and use the product. Progress feels very tangible every week.
2. Team that cares about craft
You will be part of a team that cares about crafting an amazing user experience and getting the last 5% right
3. AI first Engineering org
You will be part of an AI first engineering org. We frequently go to engineering conferences (e.g. AI engineer) and are closely connected to the forefront (YC, SF) of agentic engineering
4. AI first compensation
Our engineering team can stay smaller because of AI. That allows us to compensate more generously with equity and cash to hire the best.
5. Visa sponsor ship
We will sponsor your visa for the US or Europe if necessary
Tech stack
We like simple & reliable technology.
- Backend: Golang, Postgres
- Frontend: Typescript (Vite, no NextJS)
- 30 min interview (shorter if not a good fit)
- 60 min technical screen (3-4 technical questions)
- 1-2 day work trial (we fly you in)