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Motion Recruitment Partners, LLC

Founding Engineer

Motion Recruitment Partners, LLC, San Francisco, California, United States, 94199

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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 Google Cloud Platform, 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

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