Founding Engineer – Full Stack

About the role

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.