Founding Engineer
- Onsite
- All software engineering jobs
- FullTime
- Engineering
About the role
About the Role
This is the first engineering hire at a freshly funded pre-seed startup building the infrastructure layer for AI-native service businesses. You will work directly with the solo founder to turn a live, revenue-generating product into agentic infrastructure capable of serving a million users. If you are the right person, this role grows into a CTO seat, with the title following the work.
What You'll Do
Rebuild a working product into scalable agentic infrastructure, owning the architecture end to end.
Design and operate the agent runtime: orchestration, memory, verification, and the systems that make an AI workforce reliable.
Own the full stack, backend, infrastructure, frontend, and agent systems, taking work wherever the company needs it next.
Set the technical bar, the stack, and the engineering culture as the person who defines them first.
Ship to production users on a weekly cadence, with real businesses depending on what you build.
What We're Looking For
At least 2 years shipping production software, or an equivalent track record as a founder or solo builder. Exceptional engineers earlier in their career are explicitly welcome.
Demonstrated experience building and running LLM or AI agent systems in production, with real users depending on them. Demos and side experiments do not qualify.
Full-stack range: able to take work from backend and infrastructure through to the UI without waiting for a specialist.
Proven ability to turn a working prototype into infrastructure that holds real load, covering architecture, data modelling, runtime, and orchestration.
Experience owning technical decisions with no engineering organisation above you, as a founder, early hire, or solo technical lead.
Founder instincts, ex-founders are a strong signal.
Familiarity with agent orchestration, agent memory, evals or verification systems, or multi-agent workflows is a strong plus.
Strong academic or professional engineering background is a helpful signal, never a hard requirement.
Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, or genuinely open to relocating there.
Compensation & Benefits
Base salary: $150,000 to $250,000 USD annually. The band is intentionally wide because the right person sets their own number. Meaningful founding equity is included. Relocation support and visa sponsorship are genuinely available for candidates not yet in the US.
Location
On-site in San Francisco, CA. The founding team works deliberately in one room.
Description as published by Clera.
