Founding Engineer
Listed on 2026-08-24
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Software Development
AI Engineer (Applied/Software), Backend Developer, Full Stack Developer, Cloud Engineer - Software
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
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
- 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…
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