Staff / Senior Engineer – Founding Engineer (CTO-track)

About Varick Agents Varick is the #1 applied AI company on the planet, helping massive enterprise businesses transform from the ground up with AI nativity. Dozens of companies reach out every week, ranging from $1B to $100B in annual revenue, with individual client contracts reaching seven- to eight-figure ARR. Most large companies spend over 50% of their time on manual processes that are too complex for traditional automation and too repetitive for talented employees — Varick builds the AI agents that take over these processes, then stays embedded long-term to monitor, optimize, and continuously upgrade them. The team comes from Meta, AWS Bedrock, Citadel Securities, McKinsey, and Stanford. Backed by Work-Bench and Evan Moore (co-founder of DoorDash). Latest valuation: $30M. 100% production success rate vs. industry average of 5–13%. ## About the Role The Founding Engineer at Varick owns the technical direction of the entire platform. You design the architecture, set the engineering standards, and make the build-vs-buy decisions that determine whether Varick becomes a generational platform or stays a services business. This is not a senior IC seat inside someone else's org — you are the person defining the system. Direct path to CTO. ## What You'll Own - **Own the technical architecture:** Design and build the core platform — agent orchestration, process mining infrastructure, diagnostic pipelines, and the control plane that turns audit outputs into deployed AI systems - **Build production AI systems at scale:** Multi-step agents, retrieval pipelines, evaluation frameworks, human-in-the-loop governance running inside Fortune 5000 environments - **Ship fast, iterate faster:** Varick ships to production weekly. Drive engineering velocity, cut scope ruthlessly - **Build the engineering organization:** Recruit, mentor, and lead engineers from 5 to 50 - **Bridge research and production:** Translate frontier work (foundation models, agent frameworks, inference optimization, tool use, long-context reasoning) into production systems ## Requirements ### Must-Have - 6+ years of software engineering, with 2+ years as staff, principal, or founding engineer - Deep production AI/ML systems experience: inference, orchestration, evaluation, and monitoring — not just fine-tuning notebooks - Built and shipped systems at a top AI lab (Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Meta FAIR) OR as a founding/senior engineer at a high-growth AI startup - Strong systems design instincts: architects for reliability, scale, and iteration speed simultaneously - Ownership mentality; high agency — does not wait for requirements documents or permission - Recruits well: people want to work with you - Based in SF or willing to relocate; 5 days in-person in FiDi - No visa sponsorship available ### Nice-to-Have - Agent systems, compound AI workflows, or LLM-powered applications in production - Background in process mining, workflow automation, or enterprise integration - Infrastructure depth: Kubernetes, distributed systems, cloud architecture - Previous founding engineer or CTO experience at a venture-backed startup - Enterprise environment experience: real security, compliance, and reliability requirements - Published research or significant open-source contributions in AI/ML ## Job Details - **Salary:** $225,000 – $300,000 - **Equity:** Competitive (offers already coming in 3–4×) - **Experience:** 6+ years (2+ years staff/principal/founding) - **Visa:** None available - **Location:** San Francisco FiDi — 5 days in-person - **Headcount:** 1 ## Benefits & Perks - Founding team scope and ownership of entire technical vision - Direct path to CTO - Build platform, not features - 100% deployment rate with immediate measurable impact - Direct access to Fortune 5000 decision-makers ]]>