Rec Gen
Founding Software Engineer (AI Systems)
Location: Palo Alto, CA (Daily on-site for core collaboration hours)
Compensation: Competitive salary plus meaningful equity
Rec Gen is working with a Tier-1, VC-backed Silicon Valley startup hiring one of their first Founding Engineers to own core production systems from day one. This is a true 01 build where you will work directly with the founders on foundational AI and backend infrastructure.
This role is for engineers who want real system ownership, not feature tickets.
What You Will Own Design and ship production backend services and APIs from prototype to scale Build and productionise LLM-driven systems including RAG, retrieval, evaluation loops, and memory Own reliability in production including monitoring, debugging, and incident response Make architecture decisions around data stores, schema evolution, and security Tune latency, cost, and model performance in real-world workloads Collaborate closely with product and design to ship user-facing systems end to end
What They Are Looking For Experience shipping production backend or platform systems Comfort working directly with LLMs, embeddings, and retrieval pipelines Strong systems thinking around performance, reliability, and scalability Experience with modern cloud infrastructure and deployment Previous startup or early-stage experience strongly preferred
Nice to Have Vector databases such as PGVector, FAISS, Milvus GPU inference, model optimisation, or retrieval tuning TypeScript or frontend system experience Open-source contributions or prior founding-team exposure
Working Model The engineering team works from Palo Alto daily for a few core collaboration hours with flexibility outside of that window. This is not a remote role.
Why This Role Is Different You will own real production systems You will have direct influence on technical direction You will build alongside founders who have successfully scaled companies before You will take a product from zero to real users and real scale
To Apply Please apply directly via LinkedIn with your resume. Shortlisted candidates will receive the full technical brief.
Rec Gen is working with a Tier-1, VC-backed Silicon Valley startup hiring one of their first Founding Engineers to own core production systems from day one. This is a true 01 build where you will work directly with the founders on foundational AI and backend infrastructure.
This role is for engineers who want real system ownership, not feature tickets.
What You Will Own Design and ship production backend services and APIs from prototype to scale Build and productionise LLM-driven systems including RAG, retrieval, evaluation loops, and memory Own reliability in production including monitoring, debugging, and incident response Make architecture decisions around data stores, schema evolution, and security Tune latency, cost, and model performance in real-world workloads Collaborate closely with product and design to ship user-facing systems end to end
What They Are Looking For Experience shipping production backend or platform systems Comfort working directly with LLMs, embeddings, and retrieval pipelines Strong systems thinking around performance, reliability, and scalability Experience with modern cloud infrastructure and deployment Previous startup or early-stage experience strongly preferred
Nice to Have Vector databases such as PGVector, FAISS, Milvus GPU inference, model optimisation, or retrieval tuning TypeScript or frontend system experience Open-source contributions or prior founding-team exposure
Working Model The engineering team works from Palo Alto daily for a few core collaboration hours with flexibility outside of that window. This is not a remote role.
Why This Role Is Different You will own real production systems You will have direct influence on technical direction You will build alongside founders who have successfully scaled companies before You will take a product from zero to real users and real scale
To Apply Please apply directly via LinkedIn with your resume. Shortlisted candidates will receive the full technical brief.