Founding Engineer

About the Role

This is a founding engineering role at a YC-backed enterprise AI startup building an agentic operating system that lets business users deploy and orchestrate AI agents at scale. You will operate at CTO level, owning large parts of the product end-to-end and working at the frontier of agentic AI engineering. The impact is immediate and outsized: the product is live, revenue is growing fast, and your work will define what comes next.

What You'll Do

• Own significant portions of the product from user insight through to production deployment.

• Build and continuously improve agentic systems, making them more accurate, reliable, and powerful.

• Work at the frontier of AI engineering, including context engineering, tool use, and agent architectures.

• Talk directly to users, understand their pain points, and scope features that solve real problems.

• Ship full-stack when needed, covering both Go backend and React/Vite frontend.

• Champion AI-first development practices, using coding agents and automation to scale your own output.

• Review code quickly and maintain high standards across the codebase.

What We're Looking For

• 3 or more years of hands-on product engineering experience, with a track record of shipping from scratch.

• Strong Go backend engineering skills, with clean and maintainable code as a non-negotiable standard.

• Full-stack capability including React/Vite frontend work when the situation calls for it.

• Demonstrated experience building AI products, ideally agentic systems or AI-assisted tooling.

• Active use of AI-first development tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, or similar coding agents.

• Exceptional autonomy and product sense: you scope ambiguous problems, build, and ship without hand-holding.

• Experience building something from scratch, whether a startup, a significant side project, or a zero-to-one feature.

• Former founder experience, AI research background, or experience at an AI tooling or coding startup is a plus.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $120,000 to $250,000 per year.

• Generous equity reflecting the founding-level impact of the role.

• Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, California, United States.