Founding Engineer

YC & YC ENTERPRISES LLC
San Francisco, CA, United States
1 day ago
Apply on startup.jobs
Prepare application

Role details

Contract type
Permanent contract
Employment type
Full-time (> 32 hours)
Compensation
$120,000.0 - $250,000.0
Working hours
Regular working hours
Job source

Tech stack

Clean Code Principles Artificial Intelligence Performance Tuning Large Language Models Backend

Requirements

  • Demonstrated ability to own features end-to-end with minimal hand-holding, from ideation to production.
  • Hands-on experience designing and deploying AI-driven systems - agent architectures, context engineering, and tool use.
  • Strong track record of production readiness: monitoring, observability, performance tuning, and reliability.
  • Deep product sense with a history of building for user outcomes, not just clean code.
  • Proficiency in Go and care for clean, maintainable backend code; comfort going full-stack when needed.
  • Experience with modern AI development tooling (e.g., LLM-assisted coding, coding agents, AI-native workflows).
  • Thrives in ambiguity - you don’t need a PM to tell you what to build next.
  • Prior experience building something from scratch (startup, founding role, or significant side project) is a strong plus.
  • US work authorization required - visa sponsorship is not available.

Benefits & conditions

  • Own large product areas end-to-end, from user research and scoping through to production deployment.
  • Build and continuously improve agentic systems, making them more accurate, reliable, and powerful.
  • Work at the frontier of AI engineering - context engineering, tool use, and multi-agent architectures.
  • Talk directly to users, understand their pain points, and scope features that solve real problems.
  • Ship full-stack when needed across a Go backend and Vite/TypeScript frontend.
  • Champion AI-first development practices - coding agents, automation, and relentless self-scaling.
  • Review code quickly and maintain high standards across the codebase., Base salary $120,000-$250,000 USD annually, plus generous equity reflecting the founding-level impact of the role. Unlimited AI tooling budget included.

About the company

This is a founding engineering role at a YC-backed enterprise AI startup building an agentic operating system that enables businesses to deploy and orchestrate AI agents at scale. You’ll operate with CTO-level ownership - taking vague problems from user insight all the way to production - and play a direct hand in shaping both the product and the company. The role matters because the systems you build will power how enterprises automate complex, real-world workflows.

Apply for this position

This job is hosted externally. Click below to view the full posting and apply.

Apply on startup.jobs
Prepare application

Good distractions

Talks and stories from around this role — technically off-topic, practically not.

1:52 min

Structuring and scaling the backend engineering team

Stefan Lingler Stefan Lingler +1 · Coffee With Developers

8:32 min

Benchmarking GitOps engine constraints for extensive multi-cluster environments

Artem Lajko · Europe 2026 Virtual

1:42 min

Aligning testable code with clean code principles

Annelore Egger Annelore Egger · World Congress 2025

1:20 min

Founding an AI product within a large enterprise

Neel Sundaresan Neel Sundaresan +1 · World Congress 2026 Europe

4:05 min

Software craftsmanship manifesto and clean code principles

Marco Achtziger Marco Achtziger · Europe 2026 Virtual

4:10 min

Masking system latency through strategic character design

Ben Hopkins +1 · Coffee With Developers

Videos

See all

Related articles

See all