{"id":1245267,"url":"https://alion.io/job/mesh-founding-engineer","title":"Founding Engineer","company":{"id":3779333,"name":"Mesh","domain":"usemesh.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/mesh-8","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Gem","truth_index":null},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":153000,"max_usd":320000,"period":"year","method":"role_country_seniority_unknown","sample_n":5985},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":true},{"name":"Amazon ECS","optional":true},{"name":"Amazon S3","optional":true},{"name":"Anthropic","optional":true},{"name":"AWS","optional":true},{"name":"AWS Lambda","optional":true},{"name":"Celery","optional":true},{"name":"FastAPI","optional":true},{"name":"Human-in-the-Loop","optional":true},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true},{"name":"LLM","optional":true},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":true},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":true},{"name":"Python","optional":true},{"name":"React.js","optional":true},{"name":"SQLAlchemy","optional":true},{"name":"Tailwind CSS","optional":true},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":true},{"name":"Vite","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-07-22T23:31:05Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-07-24","last_verified_at":"2026-09-29T03:17:29Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":69,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":69},"description":"About Mesh\nEvery company has operational systems that capture what happened across the business.\nEvery company has an ERP that records the financial outcome.\nBetween them sits something surprisingly fragile: the financial logic that determines how operational reality becomes financial truth.\nToday, that logic lives in spreadsheets, approval chains, tribal knowledge, and the heads of experienced accountants.\nMesh is building the governance layer for financial logic. We ingest operational data, orchestrate AI and human workflows, apply company-specific accounting policies, and produce governed, explainable financial outputs that CFOs, controllers, auditors, and boards can trust.\nWe believe the governance layer for financial reasoning will become foundational infrastructure for every AI-native enterprise.\nWhy Mesh\nAccounting is one of the last major enterprise workflows still held together by spreadsheets, not because the industry resists change, but because every business has thousands of edge cases that traditional software couldn't model.\nOur founders have spent years building financial software alongside accounting teams.\nOur moat isn't access to foundation models. It's the governance layer built on top: financial policy engines, workflow infrastructure, enterprise integrations, evaluation systems, audit trails, and years of accumulated customer knowledge.\nThe Role\nWe're looking for a Founding Engineer to help build Mesh from the ground up.\nYou'll work directly with the founders to architect the platform, talk to customers, design new product primitives, and ship systems that become the foundation of the company. You'll own problems end-to-end, from the first customer conversation to production.\nWe're intentionally building an unusually small team to solve an unusually difficult problem. We believe exceptional companies are built by exceptional builders, not large organizations.\nWhat You'll Build\nFinancial policy engines that translate accounting judgment into executable workflows.\nAgentic systems that gather evidence, coordinate stakeholders, and operate within governed approval boundaries.\nWorkflow infrastructure connecting humans, AI, and enterprise systems.\nSpreadsheet interpretation and policy modeling that turns institutional knowledge into durable software.\nAI evaluation infrastructure for reliable, explainable production systems.\nEnterprise integrations and data pipelines across ERP, procurement, AP, HRIS, billing, and operational systems.\nAuditability and governance tooling that makes every financial decision explainable, reproducible, and trusted.\nYou'll work across backend infrastructure, AI systems, developer tooling, and enterprise product design.\nWhat You'll Bring\nCustomer obsession - You start with the customer, followed by the architecture. You enjoy understanding how people actually work before deciding how software should work.\nFirst-principles thinking - You simplify complex systems by understanding their fundamental constraints rather than copying existing solutions.\nTaste for simplicity - You enjoy turning messy workflows and complex domains into elegant abstractions.\nEnd-to-end ownership - You move comfortably from customer conversations to product design, implementation, production, and iteration.\nHigh agency - You investigate ambiguity, develop strong opinions, and move difficult problems forward.\nStrong systems judgment - You know how to build reliable systems that balance correctness, speed, maintainability, and scale.\nAI-native engineering - You use AI to dramatically increase your leverage while recognizing that great engineering comes from judgment, not generated code.\nLove of difficult production problems - You enjoy debugging failures that span infrastructure, data, product logic, and human workflows.\nWe care far more about judgment, curiosity, and rate of learning than checking every box on a resume.\nNice to Have\nExperience building backend infrastructure, workflow engines, developer tools, or large-scale data systems.\nExperience with AI agents, evaluation systems, or human-in-the-loop products.\nFamiliarity with enterprise software, financial systems, or accounting workflows.\nCuriosity for learning difficult domains and building products experts trust.\nOur Stack\nBackend: Python, FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, PostgreSQL, Celery\nFrontend: React, TypeScript, Tailwind, Vite\n AI: LLM-powered agentic workflows (Anthropic, OpenAI)\n Infrastructure: AWS (ECS, RDS, S3, Lambda)\nWe value strong engineering fundamentals over attachment to any particular framework or language. While this is our current stack, we are looking for engineers who are stack-agnostic, learn quickly, and choose the right tools for the problem.\nAI is embedded throughout both our product and our engineering workflow. We expect engineers to actively improve their own developer experience: automating repetitive work, building internal tools, creating reusable workflows, and using AI to increase the speed and quality of their output.\nWhy Join Now\nMesh is already powering live month-end close for enterprise customers. The product is real, the customers are real, and the most important technical decisions are still ahead of us.\nThe engineers who join now will shape the architecture, product, engineering culture, and long-term direction of the company.\nWe believe the governance layer for financial logic will become a foundational part of the modern enterprise stack.\nWe're building it with a remarkably small team.\nCome build it with us.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5516,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Supply Chain"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-25T17:19:35Z"}],"liveness":{"score":9,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.324,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":68,"expected_fill_days":21,"reasons":["conf:2","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-09-29T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/mesh-founding-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/mesh-founding-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-09-30T02:55:27Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":2179,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":2821,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-01T00:00:00Z"}}}