Founding Engineer
Battlement Systems · Atlanta; Austin; Boston; Dallas; Denver; New York City; Seattle; Silicon Valley; Virginia; Washington DC; San Francisco; New Jersey; Bellevue ·
- Category
- Software engineering
- Salary
- USD 100,000 – 150,000 / year
Battlement Systems · Atlanta; Austin; Boston; Dallas; Denver; New York City; Seattle; Silicon Valley; Virginia; Washington DC; San Francisco; New Jersey; Bellevue ·
The Consensus · Turkey
NVIDIA · US, CA, Santa Clara
CoreWeave Europe · Warsaw, Poland
Clockwork Systems · On Site, Palo Alto, California
Hands-on founding engineer who builds and automates low-level infrastructure: hardened nftables/Ansible firewall setups, containers, local LLM agent runtimes on bare-metal GPU clusters, PostgreSQL audit ledgers, and WireGuard mesh networking. Pure IC role with no management overhead.
Compensation: $100k – $150k • 0.01% – 1.0%
The Role
We are looking for a Founding Engineer—a pure, hands-on individual contributor who loves working low in the stack. You will build and automate the core software, firewall, container, and AI agent runtimes that run on our bare-metal GPU clusters and secure laptop terminals. There are no management meetings or slide decks in this role: you write code, deploy Ansible playbooks, and ship production systems.
What You’ll Do
Automate Firewall & System Hardening: Build declarative Ansible/Cloud-Init playbooks to purge ufw and deploy native nftables rulesets across bare-metal nodes and laptops.
Deploy Local AI & Agent Workspaces: Package and containerize local LLM stacks (AnythingLLM, Qwen2.5), optical processing engines (OCRMyPDF), and NVIDIA OpenShell / NemoClaw sandboxes.
Hands-on experience deploying and tuning GPU-accelerated workloads (CUDA, vLLM, TensorRT) and automated NVIDIA/ROCm container driver configurations.
Build Audit Ledgers: Implement PostgreSQL database schemas and automated logging daemons that capture chronological system events for GxP compliance.
Network Mesh Integration: Write automation scripts to enroll host nodes into Headscale/Tailscale WireGuard overlay networks with strict loopback and mesh whitelisting.
Remote Provisioning Execution: Drive bare-metal OS provisioning workflows via BMC/IPMI virtual media, PXE boot, and remote TPM unseal scripts.
What We’re Looking For Linux Systems Mastery: Extensive experience with Linux administration, shell scripting, systemd, and nftables kernel packet filtering.
Container & Automation Proficiency: Strong experience writing Ansible roles, Cloud-Init scripts, Docker Compose files, and PostgreSQL database queries.
Low-Level Security Mindset: Familiarity with TPM 2.0 PCR binding, LUKS drive encryption, and sandboxing untrusted Python execution environments.
Independent Execution: Ability to take direct technical specifications, build working prototypes, and ship reliable code without hand-holding.
Tech Stack Linux, Ansible, nftables, Docker / Docker Compose, Headscale / Tailscale, PostgreSQL, Python, Bash, NVIDIA OpenShell, IPMI / Redfish. CUDA, MXL, ROCm, vLLM, TensorRT.
Sequen · United States