Init Intelligence — Senior​/Founding Full-Stack Engineer, Agent Systems

Type: Full-time | On-site | San Francisco, CA
Compensation: $200,000–$300,000 + 1%–2% equity
Hiring count: 1
Visa sponsorship: Yes — H-1B, O-1, OPT
Reports to: Founders (Isaiah, co-founder, plus a second co-founder)

Init is building AI coworkers for IT teams: a security-focused product where an agent registers as a governed identity in a customer’s directory, requests scoped access per task, escalates for human approval, and drives systems it was never given an API for. The company raised a $6M seed round (no product or customers at the time), backed by Max Altman and Ben Braverman (CRO of Flexport, which sold for $2B), plus a bench of operator angels across IT and security.

Init has several design partners today and a founding team of three.

Founded: 2026 | Team size: 1–10 | Total funding: $6M seed Industry: AI Tools — IT & security automation

Website: init.inc Office:
San Francisco, CA

• True founding scope: Early engineer owning the product and system end-to-end — workflow engine, identity/authz, policy engine, credential handling, and agent sandboxes.
• Serious backing, real traction: $6M seed behind Max Altman and Flexport's ex-CRO, already live with several design partners as a team of three.
• Frontier systems + security work: Governed agent identity, delegated authorization, and secure credential handling for autonomous agents acting in production IT environments.

• An intake video is posted on the role page, but no transcript is available to parse — no intake summary captured. Ask Contrario for the intake notes or key points if you want this populated.

A backend- and systems-heavy founding engineering role where "full-stack" means owning the product and system end-to-end.

• Build the workflow engine for long-running human + agent work: durable state, retries, idempotency, approvals, replay, compensation, auditability
• Design identity and authorization for humans, services, and agents: principals, delegation, scoped sessions, tenant isolation, traceable authority
• Build a versioned policy engine (who/what can do which action on which resource, under what context)
• Own secure storage and use of customer keys, OAuth tokens, and admin credentials: isolation, rotation, ephemer injection, revocation, blast-radius containment
• Own the probabilistic-to-deterministic execution boundary: validation, evals, release gates
• Build isolated virtual environments and dev boxes for agents: reproducible state, observability, resource controls, safe teardown
• Ship the interfaces and APIs to author, approve, inspect, debug, and operate these systems in production

Tech stack: Not specified on the role page.

• Senior/Staff, backend + systems heavy
• Owns product + system end to end
• IAM/authz, workflow, multi-tenant SaaS
• Invariants, threat models, failure modes
• Fast from ambiguity, no correctness trade-offs
• SF, Mon-Fri in person

• Exceptional signal of excellence in some facet: led an important team at a high-growth company, top competition results (ICPC, IOI), or elite achievement in a sport, game, or craft
• Top-tier schooling (Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, CMU, Northeastern, Georgia Tech, UIUC, UW, Waterloo, Oxford) for a CS/eng degree, OR genuinely exceptional experience in lieu of it
• Worked at a great company on a relevant, high-caliber team (team matters, not ads)
• Big-tech backgrounds welcome for the scalability/security depth they bring
• High agency: former founders, big scope, real ambiguity; early engineers who owned architecture, production, and customer-facing product

• Career breaks / the "eat-pray" archetype (a year off, or three short jobs in a year)
• Currently "looking for work" / open-to-work with a thin,…