Founding Engineer
YC & YC ENTERPRISES LLC
San Francisco, CA, United States
1 day ago
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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.
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