{"id":1262052,"url":"https://alion.io/job/wildcard-founding-engineer","title":"Founding Engineer","company":{"id":3176126,"name":"Wildcard","domain":"wild-card.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/wild-card","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Work at a Startup","truth_index":null},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"middle","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":{"min":130000,"max":250000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":250000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":3,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"FastAI","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":false},{"name":"Scale AI","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":true},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true},{"name":"Node JS","optional":true},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":true},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":true},{"name":"React.js","optional":true},{"name":"Redis","optional":true},{"name":"Tool Use","optional":true},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-25T20:43:38Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-25","last_verified_at":"2026-09-25T20:43:38Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"About Wildcard\nWildcard is the agentic commerce optimization platform for ecommerce and retail brands.\nWe help brands understand, improve, and monetize how their products show up across AI shopping agents. We’re building the mission control for agentic commerce: visibility (AEO & GEO), recommendations, execution, attribution, and automation in one platform.\nAs shopping shifts from traditional search to AI agents, brands need to know where they appear, why competitors are winning, what to change, and whether those changes drive real business outcomes.\nWe’re growing 50% month over month.\nWho you’ll work with\nYou’ll work directly with me, Kaushik Mahorker, founder of Wildcard.\nPreviously at Scale AI, I built the ecommerce enrichment engine behind the company’s largest pilot across 400K SKUs, 2.8M attributes, and hundreds of taxonomies, helping secure $15M+ in contracts with major retailers and marketplaces.\nThat experience made something clear: shopping discovery is being rebuilt for an AI-first world, and most brands are not prepared for the shift.\nThe role\nWe’re looking for a Founding Engineer to help shape both the product and the company from the earliest stage.\nThis is engineer number one. You are not joining an engineering team. You are helping build one.\nThis role is for someone who can own product and infrastructure end to end: frontend, backend, queues, browser automation, reliability, customer-facing features, and the systems that let us move fast.\nYou’ll work directly with customers, own critical product decisions, and help decide what gets built, how it gets built, and what we prioritize as the market evolves.\nWe are looking for someone high-agency, fast-moving, and expert-level with AI coding tools. You should use AI to move significantly faster, but not outsource your judgment to it.\nThis market is moving fast. AI shopping agents, agentic commerce protocols, and consumer behavior are all changing in real time. The ambiguity is the opportunity.\nWeek 0 projects\nYou may work on:\nScaling browser orchestration and retrieval infrastructure across AI commerce surfaces\nMaking core workflows reliable with queues, retries, observability, and workflow orchestration\nBuilding incrementality and attribution systems tied to revenue outcomes for ecommerce brands\nAdapting the product to emerging agentic commerce protocols and platform launches\nBuilding agents, MCP servers, and new product surfaces across emerging verticals\nMigrating scrappy early systems into scalable product infrastructure without slowing down execution\nShipping customer-driven features quickly while making the right tradeoffs between speed and quality\nWe’re looking for someone who\nHas prior founding experience, or was early at a Seed, Series A, Series B, or similarly fast-moving company\nHas strong full-stack experience and can ship independently across the stack\nIs high-agency, self-directed, and able to turn ambiguity into shipped product\nIs expert-level with AI coding tools and uses them to move significantly faster\nHas strong judgment on when to use AI and when not to\nMoves fast, focuses on outcomes, and knows how to do more with less\nBrings new ideas constantly and can prioritize at a granular level\nIs resilient through changing priorities, new information, and mini-pivots\nGets excited by ownership, ambiguity, and wearing multiple hats\nWants to work in tight feedback loops with customers\nHas high schlep tolerance and is willing to do unglamorous work when it moves the business forward\nCan push back, think independently, and still move quickly\nPreferred experience\nTypeScript, Node.js, Express, React\nPostgres, Redis, queues, and async job systems\nBrowser automation, scraping, or retrieval infrastructure\nReliable production systems with retries, observability, and workflow orchestration\nAI agents, including context management, orchestration, tool use, and evals\nMCP servers, internal developer tools, or workflow products\nEcommerce, retail infrastructure, search, attribution, or analytics systems\nBuilding codebases and products that work well with agents\nWhy join\nMost engineers do not get to meaningfully influence whether a company succeeds. This role is different.\nYou’ll have direct influence over the product, architecture, customers, engineering culture, and company direction from day one. You’ll be able to point to decisions you made and systems you built as part of the reason why.\n1. Pending Approval\n2. Quick Call with Founder\n3. System Design\n4. One to two-day work trial\n5. Offer Extended\n6. Hired","description_format":"text","description_chars":4548,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":3,"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":["Commerce"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-25T20:43:38Z"}],"liveness":{"score":86,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.86,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":23,"reasons":["conf:5","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-09-26T02:22:27Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":250000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/wildcard-founding-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/wildcard-founding-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-09-26T02:22:27Z","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":2410,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":2590,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-09-27T00:00:00Z"}}}