Founding Engineer — AI Startup (San Francisco, In-Office)
An early-stage, venture-backed AI startup in San Francisco is hiring its first Founding Engineer . This is a ground-floor opportunity to shape the technical direction, build core systems from scratch, and influence product, culture, and engineering best practices. If you thrive in high-ownership environments and want to help define the future of an emerging AI product, this role offers significant impact and autonomy.
What You’ll Do
Architect, build, and deploy end-to-end features across the stack—from backend services to intuitive user interfaces.
Design scalable, high-performance APIs and microservices to support AI-driven workloads.
Implement and maintain frontend applications with clean, responsive, and component-driven UI architecture.
Collaborate closely with founders on product direction, technical strategy, and roadmap prioritization.
Integrate and optimize AI/ML models into production systems (LLMs, embeddings, inference pipelines, etc.).
Establish early engineering best practices around code quality, testing, CI/CD, observability, and security.
Own the full lifecycle of features from concept ? architecture ? implementation ? deployment ? iteration.
Help recruit and mentor the early technical team as the company grows.
Work in a fast-paced, experimental environment where speed, ownership, and adaptability matter.
Tech Stack (Flexible, Not Required to Know All)
Frontend: TypeScript, React, Next.js, Tailwind, Vite
Backend: Node.js / TypeScript, Python, Go (optional), Postgres, Redis, GraphQL or REST
AI / ML: Experience with LLM APIs, model fine-tuning, vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector), embeddings, inference optimization
Infrastructure: AWS or GCP, Docker, Kubernetes (nice to have), Terraform, serverless architectures
Tools & Systems: GitHub Actions, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring/observability tools (Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Sentry)
You Might Be a Fit If You…
Have 4–10+ years of full-stack engineering experience
Have experience (or strong interest) working with AI/LLM-powered products
Are excited by ambiguity and comfortable owning 0?1 technical decisions
Enjoy rapid iteration and hands‑on prototyping
Value craftsmanship but know when to optimize for speed vs. long-term maintainability
Want meaningful equity and the opportunity to shape product and culture from day one
Are able and excited to work fully on‑site in San Francisco