Founding Engineer
US work authorization is required. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Founding engineer at a YC-backed enterprise AI startup in San Francisco, building the agentic operating system for businesses.
ABOUT THE ROLE
This is a founding engineering role at a YC-backed (Seed stage) enterprise AI company building the agentic operating system for businesses. The platform enables companies to deploy, orchestrate, and manage AI agents at scale — automating complex workflows across hundreds of integrations without requiring deep engineering expertise from end users. The company has strong early traction, with thousands of agents deployed across scale-up and enterprise customers, and is growing rapidly.
We need someone who operates at CTO level: someone who can take a vague problem, scope it, build it end-to-end, and ship something that creates real user value — with no hand-holding and no waiting for specs. You are a full-stack engineer, an AI engineer, and a product engineer in one person. Being a former founder is a genuine plus.
US work authorization is required. Visa sponsorship is not available.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Own large parts of the product end-to-end — from user insight all the way to production
- Build and continuously improve agentic systems: accuracy, reliability, and capability
- Work at the frontier of AI engineering — context engineering, tool use, agent architectures
- Talk directly to users, understand their pain points, and scope features that genuinely solve problems
- Ship full-stack when needed — Go backend and Vite/TypeScript frontend
- Champion AI-first development practices: coding agents, automation, and relentless self-scaling
- Review code fast and maintain high standards across the codebase
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
Required
- Ability to own features end-to-end from ideation to production with minimal direction
- Hands-on experience designing and deploying AI-driven systems — agent architectures, context engineering, and tool use
- Track record of ensuring production readiness: monitoring, observability, performance tuning, and reliability
- Strong product sense with a demonstrated history of building for user outcomes
- Love of Go and a commitment to clean, maintainable code
- Comfort with ambiguity — you identify what needs to be built without being told
- Versatility: backend-heavy but not allergic to frontend work
- Prior experience building something from scratch — a startup, a meaningful side project, or a zero-to-one feature
Nice to Have
- AI research background
- Experience at an AI coding or developer tooling startup
- Prior founding or co-founding experience
- Familiarity with modern AI-assisted development tooling (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, coding agents)
Tech Stack
- Backend: Go
- Frontend: TypeScript, Vite
- AI Models: Multi-model environment (OpenAI GPT, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini)
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
- Salary: $120,000 – $250,000 USD annually, reflecting the outsized impact of this role
- Generous equity package — this is a founding-level seat
- Unlimited AI tooling budget — the team practices what it preaches
- Direct collaboration with a world-class design engineer and a technical co-founder/CTO committed to your growth
- A true seat at the table: you will shape the product and the company
LOCATION
On-site in San Francisco, CA. This role is not remote.