Founding Engineer

As a founding engineer and first full-time hire, you’ll be a cornerstone in building out the EffiGov platform and team. You’ll ship features, design scalable architectures, implement cutting edge tools and research, all in service of delivering for our early customers by any means necessary. You strike the right balance between scrappiness and elegance - we do everything manually or hardcode at least twice, only building the right processes or abstractions if there’s a third time. As the team grows, you’ll also be a mentor and a leader for new engineering hires. 

This role is based in San Francisco, CA, in person.

About the team

EffiGov is a technology company dedicated to improving the way our cities work. Our team combines years of experience shipping AI applications at top tech companies with long track records of local and federal civil service. We believe that the most foundational institutions in our country—local governments that provide critical services to millions of Americans every day—are severely underserved by current AI technology and distribution, and we work every day to change that. 

What Your First 90 Days Might Look Like:

• Day 1: Arrive at EffiGov HQ. Onboard. Ship your first feature (using Python FastAPI and Typescript Next.js). Celebrate with the team.
• Day 5: Resolve your first customer issue. Take note of 2 pain points and 1 opportunity for future expansion, after probing with a few well-posed follow-up questions.
• Day 12: Manage and streamline cloud deployments through refining our CI/CD pipeline and cloud infra. Now everyone can ship faster.
• Day 20: Navigate extreme ambiguity and coordinate with founders, other engineers, and FDEs to build a cohesive roadmap for the next month.
• Day 23: Temporary setback. We decide to change course on the past few days after realizing there’s a bigger opportunity that needs to be prioritized.
• Day 35: Respond to a system issue with speed and precision after identifying root causes. Write up a customer-facing incident report and note down lessons for internal operations.
• Day 36: Devise a redesign of a system component that prevents future incidents, increases reliability by 60%, and is more extendable for future updates.
• Day 45: Remember that opportunity from Day 5? After talking with some more customers to validate the opportunity, now you’re leading the development of a new product vertical that unlocks major capabilities for city employees and builds towards our vision of creating the AI operating system for cities.
• Day 60: You sense a high-leverage opportunity to add some impressive polish to one of our most used features. A customer sends a Slack message saying how much they like it.
• Day 90: Now it’s time to help expand the team and spread some of your wisdom - interview, evaluate, and bring on your first engineering mentee.

What’s required:

• 1-5 years of experience as an engineer shipping full stack solutions in an elite, high velocity team
• 1+ years of experience deploying LLMs (ideally voice AI) to production for thousands of users
• Experience with some of our tech stack: Python, FastAPI, Typescript, Next JS, Docker, MongoDB, AWS (ECS Fargate), OpenAI embeddings, LiveKit, Twilio 
• A degree or significant coursework in a quantitative subject (CS, math, statistics, physics, or engineering)
• Demonstrated initiative and “love of the game”: Examples could include projects with real users, hackathon wins or awards, and open-source contributions
• Big Bonus: Experience leading projects at a top early-stage startup or founding experience
• Small Bonuses: Humanities minor or double major, published written work, policy or government experience.

Why Join:

You want to have a tangible impact on the real, built world for everyone, not just the top 1%.

You want to have a large stake in building a durable and impactful institution.

You want to be surrounded by the top minds in AI + government for whom work is not a paycheck but a purpose.