Founding Engineer (5 -​ 15 YoE)

Job Description:

Seniority

5 -​ 15 years of experience in full-​stack engineering at a VC-​backed tech startup (Seed to Series B)

Work experience

Experience building AI agents and frameworks

Experience with voice AI (e.​g.​,​ Deepgram,​ Vapi)

Education

Undergrad in CS from top 50 school

Hard skills

Proficiency in Node.​js and React

Experience building with LLM APIs (e.​g.​,​ OpenAI,​ Anthropic)

Infrastructure ownership:​ AWS Lambda,​ ECS,​ Docker deployments

Soft skills

Highly autonomous,​ product-​minded,​ and self-​driven owner

Miscellaneous

Prefer candidates in Bay Area (SF or Oakland),​ open to remote candidates in PST or CST

Traits to avoid

Career freelancers,​ consultants,​ or IT services backgrounds

Experience exclusively at large,​ enterprise,​ slow-​moving companies e.​g.​ SAP,​ JP Morgan

History of very short tenures (e.​g.​,​ 5 jobs in 4 years)

About this role

We are looking for a Founding Engineer Lead with 5+ years of experience to join our founding team and help build our new, stealth HR tech product. You'll be a thought partner to the founders, making key infrastructure and architecture decisions for our AI-native solution from the ground up. This is a zero-to-one opportunity to build agentic workflows and voice AI systems that automate end-to-end human processes.

What will you be doing?

• Design and ship agentic AI pipelines from scratch, creating multi-step, tool-using, and self-correcting workflows.
• Build and iterate on real-time voice AI systems, tackling challenges like low-latency speech pipelines, turn-taking logic, and interruption handling.
• Own infrastructure and architecture decisions for our new platform, thinking through the right approach for an early-stage product.
• Act as a thought partner to the founders on product strategy, contributing ideas and shaping the roadmap beyond just executing a spec.
• Help scale the engineering team and set the culture as an early, pivotal member of the team.

Tech stackReact.js · Node.js · Express · PostgreSQL · AWS · LLM APIs (Anthropic, Gemini, OpenAI) · Voice AI (Deepgram, ElevenLabs, or equiv.) · Agent frameworks (LangGraph, CrewAI, or custom)