Founding AI Systems Engineer

Compensation: 1.0% – 10.0%

Remote · Part-time initially · Paid + potential equity

Water AI — wwater.ai

AI can answer almost any question. But it still waits for you to tell it what to do. Water is building AI for goals.

Instead of starting with a prompt, task, workflow, or agent, Water starts with what the user actually wants to accomplish — then determines what should happen next and helps move the goal forward.

We believe the next major AI interface won't be another chat box.

It will be an AI that understands where you're trying to go and actively helps get you there.

We're building it now.

The Opportunity

The core application is built AI-first, including an autonomous development architecture designed to let engineering agents build, test, review, and continuously improve a production system.

What You'll Own

• Autonomous development and coding-agent architecture
• Agent orchestration, context, delegation, and review systems
• AI evaluation and regression infrastructure
• Automated integration and end-to-end testing
• Continuous validation of external integrations
• CI/CD and development infrastructure
• Reliability, observability, and failure recovery
• Security and production-hardening systems
• Scalability and performance architecture
• Incremental product and platform development
• Engineering systems that allow AI agents to safely improve Water over time

Main objective: to refine and improve agentic systems to continually improve the product.

Who We're Looking For

You are unusually strong technically and want more responsibility than a normal engineering role will give you.

You can take an objective, understand the underlying problem, and independently design a solution.

You probably spend your own time experimenting with things other engineers are only beginning to hear about.

Preferred Experience:

• AI agents and autonomous systems
• Coding agents or AI development workflows
• Multi-agent orchestration
• LLM evaluation systems
• TypeScript / Node.js
• Python
• Cloud infrastructure
• Observability
• API and integration architecture

Compatibility:

• You build things independently.
• You think in systems.
• You can architect, not just implement.
• You learn extremely quickly.
• You take ownership without needing constant direction.
• You care whether something actually works in production.

Share a GitHub, research project, startup, open-source project, or system you built yourself.

Structure

Part-time initially. Paid. Potential equity and progression into a founding engineering role.

If you're looking for a conventional software job, this probably isn't it.

If you want to help build the systems behind a company attempting to change how people use AI to accomplish things, we'd like to hear from you.

See what we are building. Here.