Founding Engineer

About the Role

A YC-backed enterprise AI SaaS startup is looking for a Founding Engineer to join their small, high-output team in San Francisco. The company is building an agentic operating system for the enterprise, with thousands of agents already deployed at scale-up startups and enterprise companies. They have strong product-market fit and are growing revenue rapidly month-over-month.

This is a founding-level role with CTO-level expectations. You'll take vague problems, scope them, build them end-to-end, and ship things that create real value — with no hand-holding and no waiting for specs. You need to be a full-stack engineer, an AI engineer, and a product engineer rolled into one. Former founders are especially encouraged to apply.

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 to users, understand their pain points, and scope features that genuinely solve problems

Ship full-stack when needed (Go backend, Vite + React + TypeScript frontend)

Champion AI-first development practices — coding agents, automation, and self-scaling workflows

Review code quickly while maintaining high standards across the codebase

What We're Looking For

Must-haves (dealbreakers):

Proven production experience building backend services in Go (Golang)

Authorized to work in the United States without visa sponsorship

Required skills:

Experience building frontend applications with React and TypeScript

Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, deployment workflows, and production monitoring/observability

Experience building and consuming REST and/or gRPC APIs in microservices architectures

0–3 years of professional software engineering experience (full-stack or equivalent)

Strong pluses:

Prior startup experience or time as a founding/early engineer

Experience building AI-driven products — agentic systems, LLMs, prompt engineering, or agent orchestration

Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or equivalent) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)

Experience with relational (Postgres/MySQL) and NoSQL databases

AI research background or experience at an AI coding or tooling startup

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience

You'll thrive here if you:

Have razor-sharp problem-solving instincts and move fast without sacrificing quality

Love Go and care about clean, maintainable code

Are obsessed with AI-first development tools (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, coding agents)

Thrive in ambiguity — you don't need a PM to tell you what to build

Have built something from scratch before: a startup, a side project, or a feature that shipped and mattered

Compensation & Benefits

Salary: $120,000 – $250,000 USD annually

Generous equity reflecting the outsized impact of this founding role

Unlimited AI tooling budget

A true seat at the table — you'll shape the product and the company's direction

Location

This role is on-site in San Francisco, CA . Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States. Visa sponsorship is not available.