Founding Engineer

San Francisco on site Until 10/1/2026 3+ years exp First posted August 2, 2026 Last posted August 2, 2026
Job description

About the Role

We're a seed-stage startup building an agentic integration platform used by paying enterprise customers. As our first engineering hire, you'll own core systems end-to-end and set the engineering patterns that every future hire builds on. You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with the founders — we want your opinion, not just your code — and ship production-ready systems from day one.

This is a rare opportunity to shape the technical foundation of a company at its earliest stage, in one of the most exciting areas of software: AI agents and workflow automation.

What You'll Do

  • Own the agent platform, infrastructure, and integrations runtime end-to-end.

  • Define and establish the engineering patterns, standards, and architecture that every future engineer builds on.

  • Collaborate directly with the founders, contributing strong technical opinions and leadership.

  • Ship to production constantly, delivering reliable, observable, and scalable systems.

What We're Looking For

Must-haves:

  • 3+ years of software engineering experience in fast-paced environments; startup experience strongly preferred.

  • Proficiency in TypeScript and React for frontend, and Node.js for backend development.

  • Demonstrated ability to build something 0 to 1 — whether at an early-stage startup or through a serious side project.

  • Experience integrating or building workflows around large language models (LLMs) and agent-based platforms.

  • Experience owning end-to-end feature development across frontend, backend, and infrastructure with measurable customer impact.

  • Solid understanding of observability, monitoring, tracing, and reliable retry/queuing patterns in distributed systems.

  • Hands-on experience with AWS for cloud infrastructure and PostgreSQL for data storage.

Nice to have:

  • Familiarity with Bun, Effect-TS, or Kubernetes.

  • Background at a high-growth product company or enterprise SaaS environment.

Compensation & Benefits

  • Salary: $150,000 – $250,000 USD annually, depending on experience.

  • Equity participation as the first engineering hire.

  • Visa sponsorship available.

Location

This role is on-site in San Francisco, CA. We work together in person — it's important to us at this stage of the company.

About this role

Summary

Build core systems, set engineering standards, collaborate with founders, ship reliable scalable AI and automation systems.

Job title

Founding Engineer

Experience level

3+ years

Minimum experience

3+ years exp

Industry

software

Location requirements

on-site in san francisco, no remote work allowed

Salary

$150k–$250k

Management role

No

Skills & keywords

Required skills

typescriptreactnode.jslarge language modelscloud infrastructurepostgresql

Preferred skills

buneffect-tskubernetes

Specializations

frontendbackendinfrastructureai agentsworkflow automation
Locations

Structured locations inferred from the posting.

San Francisco, CA, USA

On-site City