Founding Engineer: Shape AI-Driven Commerce

Be the first engineer at Wildcard.

This is not a role for someone looking to be handed a clean roadmap, a settled market, and a narrow lane.

This is for someone who wants to help shape a company while it is still becoming itself.

At Wildcard, you will not just write code. You will help determine what gets built, what gets cut, what matters now, what can wait, and how the company learns. You will have real influence over whether this company succeeds. Not in a symbolic way. In a direct way.

We are looking for a founding engineer who has already seen some version of the early-stage journey before. Maybe you were a founder. Maybe you were early at a Seed, Series A, or Series B company. Maybe you have been inside a fast-moving environment where speed, judgment, and ownership mattered more than process. What matters is that you know what it feels like when things change quickly, scope has to tighten, customers are asking for something critical, and the team still has to ship.

You’ll work directly with me,Kaushik Mahorker, founder of Wildcard.

Before starting Wildcard, I was atScale AI, where I built thee-commerce enrichment engine behind the company’s largest pilot, spanning
400K SKUs, 2.8M attributes, and hundreds of taxonomies, helping secure $15M+ in contracts with major retailers and marketplaces.

That experience made one thing clear:shopping discovery is being rebuilt for an AI-first world, and most brands are not prepared for the shift.

That’s why I started Wildcard.

You’ll be joining early enough to help shape not just the product, but the company itself, with direct influence over architecture, product direction, customer outcomes, and whether we win.

That means:

• shipping product fast
• talking to customers and learning from them directly
• making smart tradeoffs under pressure
• using AI tools well, not blindly
• filling gaps manually when the product is not there yet
• helping define both our technical architecture and how we build as a company

This role requires someone who can operate in ambiguity, move quickly without becoming sloppy, and knows the difference between a one-way door and a two-way door, and builds accordingly.

• Building incrementality and attribution systems that tie our changes to revenue and business outcomes for ecommerce brands
• Build SOTA AI agent workflows with monitoring, reliability and accuracy
• Orchestrating browser-based scraping and retrieval infrastructure at scale across AI commerce surfaces
• Reworking core job systems, queues, and observability to make complex workflows reliable in production
• Defining how our product adapts to emerging agentic commerce protocols and platform launches
• Creating MCP servers, and MCP apps across new product surfaces.

We care a lot about speed. The kind that comes from good judgment, tight prioritization, and a willingness to do more with less.

We want someone who:

• has high agency
• is deeply outcome-focused
• has strong instincts for scope
• can hyper prioritize at a very granular level
• brings new ideas constantly
• is resilient through mini-pivots and changing context
• gets excited by ownership and wearing multiple hats
• wants tight feedback loops with customers
• has good taste around when to use AI and when not to
• is willing to use imperfect tools if they help us learn and move faster now

You should believe that early-stage building is not about getting everything right the first time. It is about building to iterate, learning quickly, and improving with conviction.

You should also have high schlep tolerance. If there is a product gap, you do not just point  help close it. Sometimes with software. Sometimes manually. Whatever moves the company forward.

You should be comfortable with real debate, not fake alignment. Curiosity. Strong communication. You ask a lot of questions. You care about why, not just what. And tend to be a competitive person.

• prior founding experience, or early experience at a fast-moving Seed, Series A, or Series B startup
• strong full-stack experience, especially with Type Script, Node, and Express
• experience making architectural decisions in evolving systems
• experience using AI tools to…