Founding Engineer – Full Stack

Location - San Francisco, CA (On-site) - In-office 5 days per week in San Francisco.

Compensation - $170,000 – $250,000 Base + 0.3% – 1.5% Equity

Visa - Open to Visa Transfers (OPT, H1B Transfers)

Company Stage - Seed Stage – YC-Backed

Industry - Artificial Intelligence, AI Infrastructure, Agentic AI, Enterprise Software, Brand Intelligence, SaaS

About the Company

Our client is building a new category of software that helps organizations understand and influence how AI systems perceive their brands.

The platform enables companies to measure, analyze, and improve their visibility and representation across large language models, creating a new layer of AI-native brand intelligence.

Operating at the intersection of AI interpretability, agentic systems, and enterprise software, the company helps organizations understand how AI models form opinions, make recommendations, and surface information about brands and products.

Backed by leading investors and experiencing rapid early-stage growth with enterprise customers, the company is building foundational infrastructure for the future of AI-driven brand discovery and decision-making.

As a Founding Engineer, you'll join a tiny, high-performing team responsible for building the core platform, AI systems, and customer-facing products that power this emerging category.

This is an opportunity to work directly with founders, own products end-to-end, and help define both the technical architecture and engineering culture of a rapidly growing AI startup.

What You'll Do

• Build and extend a universal context management platform powering agentic AI workflows
• Develop systems that connect customer data, communications, workflows, and business context into AI-native applications
• Apply AI interpretability techniques to better understand how LLMs form opinions and make recommendations
• Build and ship customer-facing product features end-to-end
• Own projects from customer problem identification through deployment and iteration
• Design and implement full-stack applications using Python and React
• Build internal tooling and automation systems powered by AI agents
• Develop custom software solutions for enterprise customers using AI systems with company-specific context
• Build and improve agentic workflows across multiple business use cases
• Work closely with customers to understand needs and translate them into product requirements
• Build scalable backend services and APIs supporting AI-powered workflows
• Develop infrastructure supporting AI applications and agent systems
• Work directly with founders on product, technical, and architectural decisions
• Contribute to engineering best practices and development workflows
• Help define how agentic coding tools and AI-assisted development are used across the organization
• Build systems that leverage modern LLMs and agent frameworks effectively
• Create tools and workflows that improve customer outcomes through AI
• Operate with high ownership across product, infrastructure, AI, and engineering systems
• Contribute to the long-term technical vision and architecture of the platform
• Help scale both the product and engineering organization as the company grows

Ideal Candidate Background

Experience Requirements

• 1–5 years of professional software engineering experience
• Strong full-stack engineering background
• Experience building and shipping products end-to-end
• Strong experience with Python and React
• Experience building production software in startup environments preferred
• Experience working with AI systems, LLMs, or agentic workflows
• Experience building customer-facing software products
• Experience owning projects from concept through deployment
• Comfortable working directly with customers and stakeholders
• Experience operating with high autonomy and ownership
• Demonstrated ability to execute quickly in ambiguous environments
• Strong interest in AI systems and emerging AI workflows
• Experience contributing across multiple parts of the stack
• Startup, founder, or highly entrepreneurial experience preferred
• Strong product mindset and customer empathy
• Comfortable operating in a small, high-performance engineering team

Technical Requirements

• Strong Python engineering experience
• Strong React engineering experience
• Experience building full-stack web applications
• Experience working with LLMs and AI-powered systems
• Experience building or integrating agentic AI workflows
• Experience using modern AI development tools
• Experience with Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or similar AI-assisted development tools preferred
• Experience designing and consuming APIs
• Experience building scalable backend services
• Experience with cloud infrastructure such as AWS
• Experience with Terraform or infrastructure-as-code preferred
• Strong software architecture and systems thinking
• Experience building production-grade software systems
• Strong debugging and troubleshooting capabilities
• Experience with modern frontend application architecture
• Experience working with data pipelines and AI workflows preferred
• Strong understanding of engineering tradeoffs and system design
• Ability to evaluate and implement emerging AI technologies effectively

Education

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or related technical field preferred
• Strong computer science and software engineering fundamentals
• Equivalent practical engineering experience accepted

Soft Skills

• Exceptional technical ownership
• Strong builder mentality
• Deep curiosity around AI systems and emerging technologies
• Strong analytical and problem-solving ability
• Comfortable working with ambiguity
• Strong communication skills
• Comfortable collaborating directly with founders and customers
• High execution velocity
• Strong product intuition
• Ability to reason from first principles
• Strong customer empathy
• Comfortable making decisions with incomplete information
• Low-ego collaborative mentality
• Strong learning mindset
• Bias toward action and experimentation
• Comfortable wearing multiple hats in a startup environment
• Passion for building products that deliver measurable customer value
• Comfortable working in-person in San Francisco
• Strong interest in AI-native software development

Compensation & Benefits

• Base Salary: $170,000 – $250,000
• Founding-level equity: 0.3% – 1.5%
• Opportunity to join a tiny founding engineering team
• Significant ownership over product and technical direction
• Direct collaboration with founders and early leadership
• Opportunity to shape engineering culture and development practices
• Exposure to cutting-edge AI systems, LLMs, and agentic workflows
• Opportunity to define AI-assisted software development processes
• Work directly with enterprise customers and real-world AI applications
• High-growth startup environment with significant upside
• Opportunity to help create a new category of AI software
• Visa transfer support available

Why Join

This is an opportunity to join an early-stage AI company building foundational infrastructure for how organizations interact with and influence AI systems.

You'll work directly on AI-powered products, agentic workflows, enterprise software, and AI interpretability challenges while helping define an entirely new category of software.

As a founding engineer, you'll have significant ownership over architecture, product direction, engineering culture, and technical strategy while working closely with founders and customers.

If you enjoy building AI-native products, owning systems end-to-end, working directly with users, and operating with exceptional autonomy in a fast-moving startup environment, this role offers extraordinary technical and product impact.