Founding Engineer – Full Stack

ABOUT THE ROLE Join a small, high-velocity founding team at a Y Combinator–backed AI startup building brand intelligence tooling at the intersection of AI research, product, and engineering. As a Founding Engineer – Full Stack, you'll help companies understand how large language models perceive and recommend them — and shape the product, systems, and engineering culture from the ground up. This is a rare opportunity to be one of the earliest engineers at a company defining an entirely new category of AI-powered software. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own problems end-to-end — from high-level customer insight through research and all the way down to infrastructure. - Maintain a close feedback loop with customers and the executive team; ship fast and iterate. - Help shape and grow a new engineering team at the start of a new era of software development. - Continuously reinvent best practices for building and collaborating alongside AI agents. - Translate customer needs directly into product features with strong design and product instincts. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR Required: - 1+ years of experience on engineering teams (2+ preferred), including at least one stint of 18+ months in a strong engineering environment (startup or scale-up). - Comfortable working full-stack — from customer-facing UI to backend services and cloud infrastructure. - Proficient with React, Python, Terraform, and AWS. - Experience building agentic systems or working with LLMs in production. - Startup experience or compelling self-driven personal projects that demonstrate initiative. - Strong product and design sense; ability to translate ambiguous customer needs into concrete features. - Must be a US citizen or hold a valid US work visa (no sponsorship required for this criterion — authorized to work in the US). Nice to Have: - Direct experience working with customers (sales calls, discovery, feedback sessions). - Eagerness to adopt AI-powered coding and development tooling. - Background in scientific or AI research (e.g., interpretability, NLP, ML). COMPENSATION & BENEFITS - Salary: $150,000 – $250,000 USD annually, depending on experience. - Early-stage equity as a founding team member. - Visa sponsorship available. LOCATION This is a full-time, on-site role based in San Francisco, CA. In-person collaboration with the founding team is expected.