Founding Engineer

Trace Root.

AI (YC S25) provided pay range

This range is provided by Trace Root.

AI (YC S25). Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience — talk with your recruiter to learn more.

$/yr - $/yr

As the first engineer at Trace Root, you’ll work side‑by‑side with the founders to build the product and shape our engineering culture from the ground up. You’ll wear many hats, touching everything from AI systems and user‑facing features to backend infrastructure and open‑source SDKs. We move fast, debate hard, and execute even harder, shipping new features weekly and iterating live with users.

You’ll work in person with the founders at least 3 days a week, white boarding, coding, and shipping together. If you love building fast, solving hard problems head‑on, and seeing your code impact real users within days, you’ll fit right in.

• Talk to users often to deeply understand how to improve Trace Root’s AI and UX (you can expect to spend 10‑20% of your time on support)
• Ship full‑stack features and build the foundational building blocks that users will use to build their apps seamlessly
• Maintain our open‑source projects to help grow and engage our developer community
• Improve our AI agents’ performance, reliability, and edge‑case handling to continuously enhance AI output quality (for both function + design)
• Build robust infrastructure for our end‑to‑end platform to power millions of telemetry events

• Strong full‑stack experience with React, Type Script, and Node.js: you’ve shipped production features end‑to‑end
• Strong sense of ownership: you’re autonomous and own features from start to finish
• Strong communicator: you write clearly, think rigorously, and can collaborate well within small teams
• Scrappy and execution‑driven: you move fast, make pragmatic decisions, and care about results over process, bias for action is in your DNA.
• Relentless builder mindset: you thrive under pressure, love solving hard problems, and make things happen with limited resources

• Multi‑agent systems: you’ve designed or shipped multi‑agent systems, AI‑powered coding tools, LLM orchestration frameworks, or automated code workflows
• Observability tooling: you’ve built or contributed to systems like tracing pipelines, logging, search infra, metrics platforms, or other developer‑facing observability tools
• Startup experience: you’ve worked at early‑stage startups or have been a founder yourself

• Entry level

• Full‑time

• Engineering and Information Technology
• Software Development

Referrals increase your chances of interviewing  (YC S25) by 2x