Job Description

Who is Recruiting from Scratch
Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers, software, and hardware talent at innovative companies. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across the United States to help them hire.

Title of Role: Founding Engineer (Backend / AI Agents)
Location: San Francisco, CA (On-site, 5 days/week)
Company Stage of Funding: Seed (~$7.8M raised)
Office Type: On-site
Salary: $200,000 – $300,000 + Equity (1% – 3%)

Our client is an early-stage AI startup building a proactive personal assistant that automates workflows across email, calendar, meetings, and other productivity tools.

Their vision is to create an AI system that can act on behalf of users, handling tasks, managing workflows, and continuously learning from interactions—similar to what coding copilots have done for developers, but for all knowledge workers.

The company has already raised $7.8M from top-tier investors including Kleiner Perkins and has paying customers at companies like Avoca, Rho, xAI, and Brex

With a small, high-caliber team (including backgrounds from MIT, Scale, and Jane Street), they are now hiring early engineers to help build foundational systems and define the product.

What You Will Do

• Design and build systems for context retrieval across unstructured data (email, calendar, meetings, integrations)
• Architect and ship agentic workflows that can take actions on behalf of users
• Develop memory and feedback systems that enable continual learning and personalization
• Build backend systems powering AI agents using modern frameworks and LLM APIs
• Integrate with external tools and APIs to enable seamless automation across workflows
• Collaborate closely with founders on product direction and technical architecture
• Work directly with users to understand workflows and improve product experience
• Own major parts of the system end-to-end, from design to deployment

Ideal Candidate Background

• 3–7 years of experience as a backend or full-stack engineer
• Strong experience building product-focused systems in startups
• Proficiency in TypeScript (critical requirement)
• Experience working with LLMs / AI systems / APIs (OpenAI, Gemini, etc.)
• Strong backend fundamentals and system design skills
• Product-minded with interest in productivity and workflow automation
• Comfortable working in high-ownership, fast-paced environments
• Strong communication skills and willingness to engage with users

Preferred

• Experience at high-growth, VC-backed startups (Series A–C)
• Background in productivity tools (e.g., Notion, Slack, Airtable) or workflow automation
• Experience working with unstructured data systems or search/retrieval systems
• Familiarity with Electron or building desktop-like applications
• Strong academic background (top CS programs)

Compensation and Benefits

• Competitive base salary: $200,000 – $300,000
• Significant equity: 1% – 3% (higher for exceptional candidates)
• Work directly with founders and early team
• High ownership and ability to shape core product and architecture
• Opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI agent systems
• Fast-moving team with strong technical talent density

Why Join

This is a rare opportunity to work on frontier AI problems in agentic systems and productivity automation at an extremely early stage.

You’ll be one of the first engineers, owning core architecture and building systems that directly impact how users work every day.

If you’re excited about AI agents, high ownership, and building zero-to-one products with real users, this role offers exceptional upside and learning.