Founding Engineer

Location - New York City, NY (On-site) - On-site role requiring five days per week in-office in New York City.

Compensation - $150,000 – $250,000 Base + 0.5% – 2% Equity

Visa - No Visa Sponsorship

Company Stage - Early Stage – Seed

Industry - Artificial Intelligence, Enterprise SaaS, Data Infrastructure, Agentic AI, Retail Technology, Consumer Brands, Offline Economy

About the Company

Our client is building AI-native systems designed to bring foundational intelligence to the offline economy.

The company is developing technology that helps physical brands transform how they operate across finance, sales, and business operations by combining foundational data infrastructure with outcome-oriented AI agents.

The company is operating with a very small founding team and is backed by premier Silicon Valley investors and experienced technology and business operators.

The founding team combines deep experience across financial markets, enterprise technology, data infrastructure, and high-scale engineering organizations.

As a Founding Engineer, you'll be one of the earliest technical hires and will have significant influence over both the product and engineering culture.

This is an opportunity to work directly with customers, build foundational data infrastructure at scale, develop production AI agents, and shape the technical direction of a company from the ground up.

What You'll Do

• Build and deploy evaluation and harness platforms that create fast feedback loops around product outcomes
• Develop foundational data infrastructure supporting both single-tenant and multi-tenant deployments
• Design and operate data systems capable of handling terabyte-scale workloads
• Own end-to-end delivery of production AI agents for enterprise customers
• Build customer-facing products and outcome-oriented agent workflows
• Design and implement a reinforcing context layer that captures how companies operate internally
• Build systems that transform customer data and business context into actionable intelligence
• Work directly with customers to understand business objectives and operational challenges
• Translate ambiguous customer problems into technical solutions and shipped products
• Build backend services, data infrastructure, APIs, and product experiences across the stack
• Design scalable architectures for enterprise data and AI workloads
• Establish reliable deployment and infrastructure practices from the ground up
• Work across product, infrastructure, AI, and customer-facing engineering priorities
• Own technical decisions across architecture, implementation, deployment, and production operations
• Develop systems that enable rapid experimentation and iteration around customer outcomes
• Help define engineering standards, development practices, and technical culture
• Contribute to defining the operating bar for future engineering hires and company investments
• Work closely with founders and leadership on product and technical strategy
• Operate with high autonomy in a highly ambiguous early-stage environment
• Move quickly from customer problem discovery to prototype, production deployment, and iteration
• Continuously improve the reliability, scalability, and performance of production systems

Ideal Candidate Background

Experience Requirements

• 3+ years of professional experience in backend or full-stack software engineering
• Strong experience building and shipping production software
• Experience working across backend, data infrastructure, and customer-facing product development
• Experience working in startup or highly ambiguous environments preferred
• Experience owning technical projects end-to-end
• Experience building systems that operate at meaningful production scale
• Experience working directly with customers or end users preferred
• Experience building AI-powered products or production agents preferred
• Experience working with enterprise data systems preferred
• Strong ownership mentality with demonstrated execution ability
• Comfortable operating as a generalist across multiple technical areas
• Comfortable taking ambiguous business problems and turning them into working software
• Strong product mindset and customer orientation
• Comfortable working closely with founders and senior leadership
• Ability to operate effectively as one of the earliest engineers on a team

Technical Requirements

• Strong backend engineering experience
• Strong full-stack engineering capabilities
• Strong Python experience
• Strong TypeScript experience
• Experience with Next.js or comparable modern frontend frameworks
• Experience building production APIs and backend services
• Experience designing and operating data infrastructure
• Experience with large-scale data processing or data pipelines
• Experience working with multi-tenant or distributed systems preferred
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, particularly GCP or comparable platforms
• Experience with Terraform or infrastructure-as-code tooling
• Experience deploying and operating production systems
• Experience building AI agents or LLM-powered applications preferred
• Experience building evaluation or experimentation infrastructure preferred
• Strong understanding of system architecture and distributed systems
• Strong software engineering and debugging fundamentals
• Ability to reason about scalability, reliability, and performance
• Ability to work across product, backend, infrastructure, data, and AI systems
• Ability to learn unfamiliar technologies quickly

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or related technical field preferred
• Equivalent practical engineering experience accepted
• Strong computer science, systems, and software engineering fundamentals

Soft Skills

• Exceptional technical ownership
• Strong analytical and problem-solving ability
• Deep technical curiosity
• Strong generalist mentality
• Strong product and customer orientation
• Comfortable working with significant ambiguity
• Strong communication skills
• Comfortable working directly with founders
• Comfortable working directly with enterprise customers
• High execution velocity
• Strong bias toward shipping
• Strong ability to reason from first principles
• Comfortable making technical decisions independently
• Strong architectural judgment
• Low-ego collaborative mentality
• Strong builder mentality
• Comfortable wearing multiple hats on a tiny team
• Strong business understanding
• Strong customer empathy
• Comfortable defining new engineering processes and standards
• Comfortable operating in a high-intensity early-stage environment
• Strong willingness to work five days per week in New York City

Compensation & Benefits

• Base Salary: $150,000 – $250,000
• Equity: 0.5% – 2%
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Unlimited PTO
• Daily sponsored meals
• $10,000 relocation stipend for out-of-state candidates
• Opportunity to join an extremely early-stage founding engineering team
• Significant ownership over product and technical architecture
• Opportunity to build foundational data infrastructure from the ground up
• Opportunity to develop production AI agents for marquee enterprise customers
• Direct collaboration with founders and senior leadership
• Opportunity to shape engineering culture and technical standards
• Exposure to large-scale data infrastructure and enterprise AI systems
• High-impact environment with significant product and technical ownership

Why Join

This is an opportunity to join an extremely early-stage company building foundational AI systems for the offline economy.

You'll operate as one of the first engineers, working directly with founders and customers while building the infrastructure, agents, and products that form the foundation of the company.

You'll have the opportunity to work across data infrastructure, AI agents, backend systems, customer-facing products, and enterprise workflows rather than being limited to a narrowly defined engineering function.

If you enjoy building from scratch, solving ambiguous customer problems, working across the stack, and owning systems from initial concept through production, this role offers exceptional technical and product scope.