Founding Engineer
On-site
Description
ABOUT THE ROLE
You'll join a small founding engineering team as an early hire, working directly with the founders on every major decision at an AI-native B2B SaaS startup serving industrial ingredient manufacturers. The product spans document ingestion, LLM agents, and compliance workflows, and your work will touch everything from backend pipelines to user-facing interfaces.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Build backend systems that ingest and process messy real-world documents from customer ERPs and inboxes.
- Develop LLM agents that complete complex, multi-page compliance and food safety documents.
- Own features end to end across the full stack, picking up whatever the company needs next.
- Ship fast and iterate directly on real user feedback rather than extended architecture debate.
- Work daily alongside the founding team on product direction, technical decisions, and company strategy.
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
- Prior experience as a founding engineer, founder, or early engineering hire (first 1 to 5 engineers) at a seed or Series A startup.
- Clear 0-to-1 ownership: you have built and shipped production products or major features end to end, not primarily maintained existing systems.
- Full-stack range, able to take a feature from backend service through to the UI without waiting for a specialist.
- Strong backend engineering: services that ingest and process real-world data, plus relational schema design (Postgres or equivalent).
- LLM and agent work that has run in production, not just demos or experiments.
- A high career slope: each role shows increasing ownership, scope, and impact.
- Huge drive and genuine appetite for the ambiguous, hands-on early-startup path.
- Based in the San Francisco Bay Area or clearly willing to relocate.
- Familiarity with a JVM backend (Kotlin and Spring Boot preferred, but strong engineers on other stacks are expected to pick it up), React and Next.js on the frontend, Postgres, and a major cloud provider (GCP, AWS, or Azure).
- Experience integrating multiple model providers (such as Gemini, Anthropic, or OpenAI) into production systems is a plus.
- Side projects, open-source work, or independently launched products are a strong signal.
- No degree or years-of-experience requirement.
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
Base salary: $200,000 to $300,000 annually. Equity: 0.5% to 2.0%. Visa sponsorship is not available.
LOCATION
Fully on-site, five days a week in San Francisco, California.