Founding Product Engineer
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Sep 28, 2026. First seen by Alion on Sep 25, 2026.
About Proliferate
Proliferate is the open-source, self-hostable AI IDE where you can collaborate with agents as a team.
Longer term, we are building the substrate through which companies deploy agents for real work. We believe the future of all work is companies staffed by thousands of agents and we’re building the platform that manages them.
We’re early, the product still has rough edges, and we’re oriented around large goals. We are backed by True Ventures, Pear VC, and 50+ YC founders- and we work together in person in SoMa, San Francisco.
About the founder
I’m Pablo! I finished my bachelor’s at 17, ran a consulting company at 18, completed my master’s in AI at 19, and joined Onyx (YC W24) as engineer #1. I spent a year building enterprise AI search before starting Proliferate.
I started Proliferate because I believe this is the most ambitious thing I could possibly be working on, and I’ve turned down eight figures in acquisition offers to keep building it.
The role
We are hiring exceptional founding engineers. You will be one of the first engineers at Proliferate, working side by side with the founder and early team, and owning major parts of the product end to end.
You might, one week to the next:
- Design a new interface for human-agent collaboration made possible by a model capability that landed a few days ago.
- Turn repeated engineering or company processes into fully agent-owned workflows.
- Take a sharp customer pain point from rough idea to polished product surface in days.
How we work
- We ship unusually fast. A tiny team means your decisions immediately change the product.
- We reason from first principles, protect long stretches of deep work, and use agents liberally but intentionally through the company.
- We are deeply AGI-pilled, ship fast and dream big, but we don’t confuse recklessness with speed or grandiosity with ambition.
- We care about what works and what impacts people’s lives.
Benefits / company culture
We are intentional about our long term health and consider performance core to the company culture- we work according to the following.
- Free wearable (Whoop, etc.)
- Free gym (Equinox or comparable gym)
- Free meals at the office (be warned- we tend to eat a lot of Sweetgreen)
- Mornings are protected deep work time- company policy of no meetings if we can avoid them
You might be a great fit if
- You learn frighteningly fast
- You have shipped something 0→1. Ex-founders are especially welcome!
- You use AI tools seriously and have real opinions about where they fail
- You want unusually dense learning and ownership
- You are looking for the most ambitious project you can find and want your work to matter immediately
Interview process
- 15-minute call
- 30-minute technical conversation with a codebase and agents open on your end
- Paid work trial: 1-3 days, $1-3K
- References and offer