Founding Engineer, Platform
Location: San Francisco Bay Area — HybridCompensation: 225,000–300,000 base salary + 0.5%–1.0% equityEmployment: Full-timeRelocation: No relocation support available
About the Company
A seed-stage AI startup is building the data and workflow infrastructure behind modern go-to-market teams. Its platform lets users describe what they need in plain language, then uses AI agents to build and execute workflows—from enriching company and contact data to scoring leads and updating CRM records.
The team is developing an agent-first platform with a custom workflow engine, an in-house evaluation stack, and a modern TypeScript architecture. Engineers own both technical decisions and product outcomes.
The Opportunity
We’re looking for a hands-on, staff-level backend engineer to own the engine behind every customer workflow.
You’ll work closely with the technical co-founder to build reliable, high-volume infrastructure across scheduling, queues, integrations, and data processing. You’ll take projects from an ambiguous idea through architecture, implementation, launch, and customer feedback.
This is an opportunity to make foundational decisions, shape product direction, and earn meaningful ownership in an early-stage company.
What You’ll Do
- Own and evolve the workflow engine, including scheduling, background jobs, queues, retries, and failure recovery.
- Build infrastructure that processes high volumes of structured and unstructured data.
- Improve database performance, scalability, data consistency, and system availability.
- Design reliable integrations with external data providers and CRM platforms.
- Help develop a custom workflow compiler and agent-native execution capabilities.
- Build evaluation and monitoring systems that make AI-powered workflows more dependable.
- Design actionable errors and interfaces that help both developers and AI agents recover from failures.
- Anticipate how architectural decisions affect the broader shared platform.
- Own features from scoping through delivery, making practical trade-offs and following through on results.
What You’ll Bring
- 5+ years of professional backend or platform engineering experience.
- Experience at an early-stage startup, ideally seed through Series B, as an early engineer, founding engineer, or founder.
- Experience building production job systems, queues, or data pipelines at scale.
- Experience with Effect or functional TypeScript.
- Demonstrated ownership of scalability, data consistency, and availability in high-load or shared infrastructure.
- Strong database and system-design judgment, including the ability to explain past decisions, trade-offs, and lessons learned.
- Ability to independently turn loosely defined problems into reliable products.
- A bachelor’s degree.
- Ability to commute for hybrid work in San Francisco or the Bay Area.
Helpful Experience
- Workflow orchestration, durable execution, scheduling, retries, and idempotency.
- Postgres and Redis performance and reliability.
- Data enrichment, provider integrations, rate limiting, and CRM synchronization.
- AI agent tooling, evaluation systems, or compiler development.
- Building software used by other developers, teams, or services.
Technology
TypeScript, Effect, Postgres, Redis, React, Vite, TanStack, and ElectricSQL.
Why Join
- Own infrastructure central to every customer workflow.
- Work directly with the technical co-founder and influence product direction.
- Help build an agent-first platform at an early stage.
- Take projects from idea to customer delivery with substantial autonomy.
- Receive competitive compensation and meaningful equity.
- Visa transfers may be considered.
Interview Process
- Recorded recruiter screen — 30 minutes
- Hiring manager conversation — 20 minutes
- Technical interview — 60 minutes
- Onsite interviews — approximately 4–6 hours, including TypeScript and workflow implementation exercises and time with the team
Pay: $225,000.00 - $300,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- 401(k)
- 401(k) matching
- Dental insurance
- Health insurance
- Life insurance
- Paid time off
- Retirement plan
- Vision insurance
Work Location: In person
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