Founding Engineer

About the company

A pre-seed startup in San Francisco is building the operating system for AI-native service companies: a workforce of AI agents that runs a service business's day-to-day operations end to end. The founder is a second-time founder with a prior exit who has just relocated to SF, and the company recently closed its angel round with leading operator-angels from Europe and the US.

The role

You will be one of the first three engineers, and the first ones hired. This is a CTO-calibre seat: you set the technical direction, write most of the early code, and decide what "production-ready" means for agents that run real businesses.

There are three flavours of this role, and strong candidates often span more than one:

• Product-minded engineer: takes a vague customer problem to a shipped, polished product in days

• Agent / LLM engineer: builds agent harnesses, tool use, evals and orchestration that hold up in production

• Full-stack / infra engineer: builds the platform, data layer and reliability that let agents run at scale

What you'll do

• Build the core agent platform from zero with the founder

• Ship end-to-end product for the first design partners, fast

• Own architecture, tooling and engineering culture as the team grows

• Talk to customers directly and turn what you learn into product

What you bring

• 2 to 8 years of hands-on software engineering, with production systems you built yourself

• Zero-to-one experience: founder, technical co-founder, CTO, or a founding or very early engineer at a high-growth startup

• An unusually fast learner, with something distinctive on your profile (a company you built, a hard technical project, olympiad or competition results, a top internship)

• You use AI agents heavily in your own work and have opinions about the tooling and harnesses you build

• You want to build intensely: this is a 6-day, in-person team in San Francisco

Nice to have: early engineering at a top AI-native or YC startup; strong internships (quant firms, AI labs, top tech); a strong CS or engineering degree

Working here

• In person in San Francisco, 6 days a week, alongside the founder

• Relocation supported; O-1 visa route for exceptional international candidates (a start in Vienna before moving to SF is possible)

• Competitive SF base plus meaningful founding equity; co-founder-level equity for exceptional candidates

• Process: intro call with the founder, deep-dive, technical interview, close