Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer - AI Startup (San Francisco, In-Office)
An early-stage, venture-backed AI startup in San Francisco is hiring its first Founding Engineer. This is a ground-floor opportunity to shape the technical direction, build core systems from scratch, and influence product, culture, and engineering best practices. If you thrive in high-ownership environments and want to help define the future of an emerging AI product, this role offers significant impact and autonomy.
What You'll Do

• Architect, build, and deploy end-to-end features across the stack-from backend services to intuitive user interfaces.
• Design scalable, high-performance APIs and microservices to support AI-driven workloads.
• Implement and maintain frontend applications with clean, responsive, and component-driven UI architecture.
• Collaborate closely with founders on product direction, technical strategy, and roadmap prioritization.
• Integrate and optimize AI/ML models into production systems (LLMs, embeddings, inference pipelines, etc.).
• Establish early engineering best practices around code quality, testing, CI/CD, observability, and security.
• Own the full lifecycle of features from concept ? architecture ? implementation ? deployment ? iteration.
• Help recruit and mentor the early technical team as the company grows.
• Work in a fast-paced, experimental environment where speed, ownership, and adaptability matter.

Tech Stack (Flexible, Not Required to Know All)

• Frontend: TypeScript, React, Next.js, Tailwind, Vite
• Backend: Node.js / TypeScript, Python, Go (optional), Postgres, Redis, GraphQL or REST
• AI / ML: Experience with LLM APIs, model fine-tuning, vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector), embeddings, inference optimization
• Infrastructure: AWS or Google Cloud Platform, Docker, Kubernetes (nice to have), Terraform, serverless architectures
• Tools & Systems: GitHub Actions, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring/observability tools (Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Sentry)

You Might Be a Fit If You...

• Have 4-10+ years of full-stack engineering experience
• Have experience (or strong interest) working with AI/LLM-powered products
• Are excited by ambiguity and comfortable owning 0?1 technical decisions
• Enjoy rapid iteration and hands-on prototyping
• Value craftsmanship but know when to optimize for speed vs. long-term maintainability
• Want meaningful equity and the opportunity to shape product and culture from day one
• Are able and excited to work fully on-site in San Francisco