Founding Engineer

About the Role

Join an early-stage AI company as its first engineering hire, working closely with the founder to turn a working AI-powered service business product into scalable infrastructure. You will shape the architecture and technical foundations for AI agents supporting real-world business operations, with the opportunity to grow into a CTO role as the company develops.

What You'll Do

• Rebuild and scale the existing product into infrastructure designed to support substantial user growth.
• Design and operate the agent runtime, including orchestration, memory, verification, and reliability systems.
• Build across backend, infrastructure, frontend, and AI agents, taking projects from design through production.
• Set technical architecture, engineering standards, and development practices as the first engineer.
• Ship product improvements regularly to customers running real businesses.

What We're Looking For

• At least 2 years of experience shipping production software, or an equivalent record as a founder, solo builder, or exceptional early-career engineer.
• Full-stack range across backend, infrastructure, and user-facing product development, with the ability to make technical decisions independently.
• Hands-on experience building and operating LLM or AI agent systems used by real customers, not just prototypes or demos.
• Experience taking a working product or prototype to reliable production infrastructure, including architecture, data models, runtime, or orchestration.
• Strong generalist engineering skills and the ability to explain the technical challenges behind systems you have built.
• Experience with agent orchestration, memory, evaluations, verification, or multi-agent workflows is valuable. Background in service businesses such as recruiting or agencies is also useful.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary is $150,000 to $250,000 annually, plus meaningful founding equity. Visa sponsorship and relocation support are available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, California. The team works together in person.