{"id":3431595,"url":"https://alion.io/job/zatanna-founding-engineer","title":"Founding Engineer","company":{"id":3779708,"name":"Zatanna","domain":"zatanna.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/zatanna","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":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":{"min":160000,"max":200000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":200000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-29T00:47:32Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-29","last_verified_at":"2026-10-29T18:28:58Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"Zatanna is building the infrastructure that allows AI agents to interact with any software by turning applications into real, programmable APIs.\nAI agents are increasingly capable of performing work that was previously done by humans, but they're still constrained by software interfaces designed for people. Today, agents rely heavily on clicking buttons, navigating pages, and interacting with UIs to get things done. This approach is slow, fragile, and difficult to scale.\nAt Zatanna, we're changing that. We reverse engineer applications to turn their underlying workflows and actions into reliable, read-and-write APIs, regardless of whether those applications offer APIs themselves. From modern cloud applications and web portals to retail websites to legacy desktop software and on-premises systems, we're making the world's software programmatically accessible.\nOur goal is to become the infrastructure layer that connects AI agents to the software that runs the real world.\nAbout the Role\nZatanna is looking for a Founding Engineer with deep expertise in reverse engineering and infrastructure to work directly alongside the founders to build and scale our core technology.\nYou'll be responsible for creating and maintaining integrations across web portals, cloud applications, and on-premise software, often working with systems that have little to no documentation and were never designed for programmatic access.\nThis is a highly technical, hands-on role that involves close customer communication, tight deadlines, and frequent context switching across industries like healthcare, logistics, and enterprise software.\nWhat you'll work on:\nReverse engineer web applications, desktop software, and legacy systems to create reliable read/write APIs.\nBuild and scale the infrastructure responsible for running, monitoring, and maintaining integrations across thousands of customer environments.\nSolve challenging problems involving authentication, session management, browser automation, network protocols, and undocumented APIs.\nDevelop robust systems for interacting with on-premise software through RDP, virtual machines, and other remote access methods.\nWork directly with customers to understand their technical requirements, troubleshoot issues, and ship solutions quickly.\nDesign systems that can recover gracefully from UI changes, application updates, and unexpected failures.\nHelp shape the engineering culture, architecture, and technical direction of Zatanna from the ground up.\nWho we're looking for:\nStrong experience with reverse engineering, backend engineering, distributed systems, or infrastructure.\nComfortable working with browser internals, HTTP requests, network traffic, authentication flows, and undocumented APIs.\nAbility to independently investigate unfamiliar systems and figure out how they work.\nExperience building production-grade systems where reliability, performance, and scalability matter.\nComfortable moving quickly, juggling multiple priorities, and owning problems end to end.\nStrong communication skills and willingness to work directly with customers.\nHigh agency, technical curiosity, and a bias toward shipping.","description_format":"text","description_chars":3163,"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":["Artificial Intelligence","AI Agents","Procurement & Spend 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