Founding Engineer

About the Role

A seed-stage AI SaaS startup is looking for a Founding Engineer to join their early team in San Francisco. This is a high-ownership, high-impact role for someone who thinks from first principles, thrives in ambiguity, and aspires to build companies someday. You'll work directly with the founding team to shape core architecture and technical strategy as the company pushes toward Series A.

The platform delivers deep, real-time intelligence on people to power AI agents and next-generation applications — processing data across social networks and online platforms at scale.

What You'll Do

• Design, build, and operate core infrastructure for a people-data and agent platform, including APIs, LLM-powered workflows, scraping systems, and large-scale knowledge graph architecture.

• Architect and maintain production-grade systems capable of handling millions of API requests, with a strong focus on performance, cost efficiency, and reliability across cloud and Linux server environments.

• Own projects end-to-end — from ambiguous problem definition through deployment and iteration — shipping quickly without sacrificing system integrity.

• Collaborate directly with the CEO and CTO on technical decisions, roadmap priorities, and foundational architectural choices.

• Contribute broadly across the stack: developer documentation, technical tutorials, internal tooling, and experimental builds that showcase and stress-test APIs.

What We're Looking For

• Required: 1+ years of professional experience shipping software to production.

• Experience with APIs, LLMs, and AI agent frameworks.

• Comfort working with distributed systems, microservices, and cloud infrastructure (AWS and/or GCP).

• Hands-on experience with data pipelines, database optimization, and Linux server environments.

• High agency — someone who can take an ambiguous problem and drive it to a solution independently.

• First-principles thinker who is energized by early-stage, fast-moving environments.

Nice to have: Experience with large-scale knowledge graph architecture or web scraping systems at scale.

Visa sponsorship: Not available.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $150,000 – $220,000 USD annually