Founding Engineer

### About the Role This is a **Founding Engineer** role at a **Y Combinator-backed enterprise AI startup** building the agentic operating system for modern businesses. The platform orchestrates AI agents that automate complex operational and sales workflows at scale — deployed across scale-up startups and enterprise companies alike, with strong product-market fit and rapid revenue growth. You will operate at a near-CTO level: taking vague problems, scoping them, building end-to-end, and shipping real value — with no hand-holding and no waiting for specs. This is a seat at the table. You'll help shape the product, the architecture, and the company itself. **No visa sponsorship is available. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship.** ### What You'll Do - Own large parts of the product end-to-end — from user insight to production - Build and continuously improve agentic systems: accuracy, reliability, and capability - Work at the frontier of AI engineering — context engineering, tool use, and agent architectures - Talk directly to users, understand their pain points, and scope features that genuinely solve problems - Go full-stack when needed: **Go** backend and **React + Vite (TypeScript)** frontend - Champion AI-first development practices — coding agents, automation, and aggressive self-scaling - Review code quickly while maintaining high standards across the codebase - Design, build, and ship AI-driven product features with a focus on real-world impact ### What We're Looking For **Must-haves (dealbreakers):** - Proven production experience building backend services in **Go (Golang)** - Authorization to work in the United States without visa sponsorship **Required skills & experience:** - Frontend experience with **React** and **TypeScript** (modern JS frameworks) - Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, deployment workflows, and production observability/monitoring - Experience building and consuming **REST and/or gRPC APIs** in microservices architectures - 0–3 years of professional software engineering experience (full-stack or equivalent) - Deep product sense — you build for users, not for code's sake - Comfortable with ambiguity; you don't need a PM to tell you what to build **Nice-to-haves:** - Prior experience with AI infrastructure, model deployment, prompt engineering, or agent orchestration - Experience building agentic AI systems or AI coding tools (e.g. familiarity with LLMs, agent frameworks) - Previous startup experience or founding/early-engineer background; having built something from scratch is a strong plus - Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, or equivalent) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) - Experience with relational databases (Postgres/MySQL) and NoSQL, with an understanding of storage trade-offs - AI research background or experience at an AI coding startup - Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience ### Compensation & Benefits - **Salary:** $120,000 – $250,000 USD annually (reflecting outsized impact) - **Equity:** Generous equity package commensurate with a founding-level role - Unlimited AI tooling budget — the team actively uses and advocates for AI-first development - Direct collaboration with technical co-founders in a high-growth, high-ownership environment - Rapid career growth in a genuinely founding-level seat ### Location This role is **on-site in San Francisco, CA**. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and expects in-person collaboration.