Founding Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 17, 2026. First seen by Alion on Sep 16, 2025.
Founding Engineer
tl;dr: We're hiring our founding engineers to help scale Keplar to the next breakout growth milestone. You'll work directly with our CEO and founding team to solve some of the most interesting and challenging problems in software today: building novel voice interfaces, deploying agents to scale, running applied R&D experiments, and shaping a product that's redefining how enterprises learn about their customers. This is a high-ownership, high-impact role for someone excited to bet on a career-defining opportunity at a fast-moving, venture-backed startup.
About Keplar
Keplar is an AI-powered market research platform that enables companies to conduct qualitative research at quantitative scale. Our mission is to enable all businesses to grow by being customer-obsessed through the power of AI. Using advanced voice AI and agentic analysis, Keplar helps businesses have natural conversations with hundreds of customers simultaneously, transforming months of research into insights within hours.
Founded in 2022 and backed by Kleiner Perkins, SV Angel, Common Metal, and South Park Commons, Keplar serves leading brands including Clorox, Intercom, SC Johnson, Tecovas, and Marzetti.
We're reinventing market research, insights, and customer understanding - a critical but underserved part of business - which directly impacts innovation, marketing, and positioning for iconic brands.
Why Keplar
Explosive growth: We're seeing traction across mid-market and enterprise, averaging six-figure deals and high-velocity sales cycles.
Product-market fit: We close at a high rate, and most deals are driven by real customer pain - meaning we rarely compete on price.
High Performance team: Big-tech rigor meets startup speed and ferocity - with experience from Research at Google, Engineering at Meta, and growth at Samsara. We believe great things get built by lean, tight-knit teams chasing big ideas.
Industry recognition: Featured in TechCrunch (Sept 2025), a16z, and Foundation Capital for redefining the future of customer research.
Massive market: The customer understanding market is huge, with growing demand for tools that help run end-to-end workflows and deliver high-quality customer insights with speed and scale.
What You'll Do
As a founding engineer, you'll own core parts of the product stack and help chart the technical direction of the company. Expect to work across full-stack engineering, UX, and infrastructure, with impact that's visible from day one.
Build product development harnesses: Design agentic coding workflows using tools like Claude Code to create automated development and verification loops, enabling engineers to ship features faster through AI-driven implementation, testing, and iteration.
Push the boundaries of voice agents: Deploy robust voice data pipelines for dynamic, 1-1 human conversations, reasoning, and analysis at scale.
Rethink user flows with agent-led UX: Keplar's backend is agent-led, meaning users access many of our features by talking to an agent. Build the future of agent-led UX and lead experiments with generative UI.
Scale infrastructure: Design systems that reliably run high volumes of AI-mediated interviews concurrently, manage growing datasets, and integrate securely into enterprise workflows.
Shape the foundation: Establish engineering best practices in the agentic coding era, mentor early hires, and contribute to a culture of speed, rigor, and craftsmanship.
Close the loop: Work closely with Growth and Customers to bring product feedback into the roadmap, ensuring we're building the right things at the right time.
What We're Looking For
AI turned impossibly ambitious projects into execution problems. The constraint is no longer ideas - it’s shipping.
We’re hiring engineers with 5-7+ years of experience who can move fast, make good decisions under ambiguity, and consistently deliver.
A builder
You want to build ambitious projects: to build something 10x better than what exists, not 5% cheaper. The way you get there is by shipping. Constantly. Simple, extensible, maintainable at our current scale. You're not process-heavy and you're not chasing technical purity. It isn't vibe coding; it's scaled-up delivery focused relentlessly on the product and the customer. Output is the path.
High agency
You don't wait for a spec. You go find it. Industry context, customer calls, the half-formed requirement nobody's written down yet: figuring it out is part of the job. You make calls on your own. Some will be wrong, and that's the point: you learn fast and keep iteratively improving.
Enterprising
Enterprising AI has raised what one person can deliver, and you ride that wave. You embrace agentic coding, follow what's new, and get more effective every week. But you're allergic to AI slop. You care deeply about what you put your name on. AI is widening the gap between good engineers and great ones. The great ones use it as leverage without losing their craft. That's you.
This is the synthesis we're betting on: builders who use AI as leverage to attempt what wasn't possible a year ago. If that's you, the rest follows.
What you bring
3-7+ years building full-stack software. Bonus if you've touched voice or chat agents.
Proficiency in Typescript, SQL databases, and cloud infrastructure.
You've shipped real things in real startups: 0→1, 1→10, ideally both.
Real depth in full-stack web and backend systems. ML/AI pipelines and real-time/voice infrastructure are a bonus.
Genuine curiosity for applied R&D: LLMs, voice generation, speech recognition, reasoning models.
Bonus: prior experience with enterprise SaaS, research/insights tools, or scaling products with heavy data/compute requirements.
Compensation
This is a full-time role with a competitive salary and meaningful early-stage equity. You'll be joining at the ground floor, with the ability to shape both product and culture.
We want this to be the most rewarding role of your career.