Engineering Team Lead - Ai Product - San Francisco

Founding Architect — 3–5% Equity + $250K

Founding Architect — 3–5% Equity + $250K

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This range is provided by Startup Resources. Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience — talk with your recruiter to learn more.

Base pay range

$200,000.00/yr - $250,000.00/yr

We're hiring a Founding Architect to join a stealth-stage startup backed by South Park Commons, Homebrew, and top-tier angel investors.

This is a true ground-floor opportunity to build from scratch alongside two experienced founders who’ve scaled products to millions in ARR at Meta, Airtable, and Yelp. You’ll be their first technical hire, with full ownership of architecture, product direction, and long-term impact.

Who You Are

You’re the kind of person who’s considered starting your own company but haven’t yet found the right idea, co-founder, or timing. Maybe you’ve explored joining a very early-stage startup but decided the risk-reward ratio wasn’t quite right.

We get it (and agree) that early employees are critical to a company’s success and are often undervalued. That’s why we’re offering top-of-market equity (5x the median) and base compensation in the top 10% of the market. We don’t think this is generous. We think it’s fair.

What You’ll Do

• Ship 0–1 product features with real users from day one
• Work across the stack (production experience with Typescript preferred)
• Define both the technical and product vision
• Build tooling that helps product teams prioritise smarter, not just ship faster

Requirements

• You’ve stuck with your current or previous company for at least 2 years, as we’re looking for builders who commit
• You’ve led teams or projects as a tech lead
• You’ve shipped high-quality 0–1 products to users

Process

We move fast but thoughtfully. The process includes:

• Two screening interviews (one remote, one in person) focused on real-world problem solving — no prep required
• A paid work trial: ideally 2+ days working together on a real-world project in Typescript or Python

If you’re looking to help define a product, a company, and a culture — and want to be rewarded like a founder — we’d love to talk.

Seniority level

• Seniority level

  Director

Employment type

• Employment type

  Full-time

Job function

• Job function

  Information Technology, Engineering, and Product Management

• Industries

  Software Development, Technology, Information and Media, and Robotics Engineering

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