Founding Engineer

About the Role

This is a Founding Engineer role at a small but fast-moving enterprise AI startup building configurable automation products for distributors and manufacturers. The company's platform automates critical back-office and sales operations workflows — including quoting, order entry, and process execution — and integrates directly with customers' existing ERP and CRM systems.

The product is already live with customers doing significant revenue, and demand is growing fast. As the first engineering hire, you'll work closely with the founders, own problems end to end, and have outsized influence on what gets built and how. Visa sponsorship is available.

What You'll Do

• Own problems completely — from talking with customers and mapping their workflows, to designing and shipping the solution.

• Build across the full stack: customer-facing features, AI agents, third-party integrations, and cloud infrastructure.

• Improve the evals, tests, and tooling that make each new customer implementation faster and more reliable.

• Week one: Ship your first feature to a live customer.

• Month one: Get on a customer call, identify a problem, design it, and deploy the fix.

• Quarter one: Own a meaningful surface area of the product end to end.

What We're Looking For

Must-haves:

• Full-stack development experience shipping production web applications with TypeScript, Next.js, and Python.

• Demonstrated experience building production-ready AI agents: context engineering, tool design, and evaluation frameworks.

• Hands-on experience deploying and managing applications on Google Cloud Platform.

• Experience integrating with legacy systems, third-party APIs, and enterprise software platforms.

• Track record of owning features end to end — from customer requirements through design, implementation, testing, and deployment.

• Experience conducting customer discovery and translating real business problems into technical solutions.

• Experience building automated testing, evaluation frameworks, and observability tooling for production systems.

• Comfort thriving in early-stage startup environments with small teams and rapid iteration.

Nice-to-haves:

• Experience with LLM frameworks, prompt engineering, or AI agent orchestration tools.

• Familiarity with ERP systems, manufacturing workflows, or B2B operations automation.

• Experience building integrations with enterprise software or data systems.

You're a great fit if you:

• Prefer owning whole problems over working from a narrowly defined backlog.

• Enjoy talking directly with customers and getting to the root of their needs.

• Ship fast without sacrificing quality.

• Stay on the bleeding edge of AI tooling while exercising your own engineering judgment.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $140,000 – $220,000 USD annually

• Early equity in a high-growth, revenue-generating startup

• Visa sponsorship available

Location

This role is on-site in San Francisco, CA. The team works closely together in person — remote or hybrid arrangements are not available for this position.