About the Role

A YC-backed enterprise AI SaaS startup is looking for a Founding Engineer to join their small, high-output team in San Francisco. The company is building an agentic operating system for the enterprise, with thousands of agents already deployed at scale-up startups and enterprise companies. They have strong product-market fit and are growing revenue rapidly month-over-month.

This is a founding-level role with CTO-level expectations. You'll take vague problems, scope them, build them end-to-end, and ship things that create real value — with no hand-holding and no waiting for specs. You need to be a full-stack engineer, an AI engineer, and a product engineer rolled into one. Former founders are especially encouraged to apply.

What You'll Do

Own large parts of the product end-to-end — from user insight all the way to production

Build and continuously improve agentic systems: accuracy, reliability, and capability

Work at the frontier of AI engineering — context engineering, tool use, agent architectures

Talk to users, understand their pain points, and scope features that genuinely solve problems

Ship full-stack when needed (Go backend, Vite + React + TypeScript frontend)

Champion AI-first development practices — coding agents, automation, and self-scaling workflows

Review code quickly while maintaining high standards across the codebase

What We're Looking For

Must-haves (dealbreakers)

Proven production experience building backend services in Go (Golang)

Authorized to work in the United States without visa sponsorship

Required skills

Experience building frontend applications with React and TypeScript

Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, deployment workflows, and production monitoring/observability

Experience building and consuming REST and/or gRPC APIs in microservices architectures

0–3 years of professional software engineering experience (full-stack or equivalent)

Strong pluses

Prior startup experience or time as a founding/early engineer

Experience building AI-driven products — agentic systems, LLMs, prompt engineering, or agent orchestration

Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or equivalent) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)

Experience with relational (Postgres/MySQL) and NoSQL databases

AI research background or experience at an AI coding or tooling startup

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience

You'll thrive here if you

Have razor-sharp problem-solving instincts and move fast without sacrificing quality

Love Go and care about clean, maintainable code

Are obsessed with AI-first development tools (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, coding agents)

Thrive in ambiguity — you don't need a PM to tell you what to build

Have built something from scratch before: a startup, a side project, or a feature that shipped and mattered

Compensation & Benefits

Salary: $120,000 – $250,000 USD annually

Generous equity reflecting the outsized impact of this founding role

Unlimited AI tooling budget

A true seat at the table — you'll shape the product and the company's direction

Location

This role is on-site in San Francisco, CA. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States. Visa sponsorship is not available.