Founding Engineer

Full Job Description

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.

Discovered directly from the employer’s public Ashby Job Postings API. The complete public role content and compensation metadata were normalized into safe candidate-facing sections.