Founding Engineer

About the Role

You'll join as the second engineering hire on a founding team building AI agents for industrial ingredient manufacturers, a sector responsible for the ingredients in virtually every food product on the market. This is a ground-floor role where you'll work directly with the founders on every major technical and product decision the company makes.

What You'll Do

• Build backend systems that ingest and process messy real-world documents from customer ERPs and inboxes.

• Develop LLM agents that complete complex, multi-page compliance and food safety documents.

• Own features end to end across the full stack, picking up whatever the company needs next.

• Ship fast and iterate on real user feedback rather than debating architecture.

What We're Looking For

• Prior experience as a founding engineer, founder, or early engineering hire (first 1 to 5 engineers) at a seed or Series A startup.

• Demonstrated 0-to-1 product ownership: you have built and shipped production products or major features end to end, not primarily maintained existing systems.

• Full-stack range across backend, frontend, and infrastructure, with the ability to take a feature from backend service through to the UI without waiting for a specialist.

• LLM and agent work shipped to production, such as RAG pipelines, search, or automation tools, not just demos.

• Strong backend experience including services that ingest and process real-world data, plus relational schema design (Postgres or equivalent).

• Experience with Kotlin and Spring Boot, or another JVM backend (willingness to learn Kotlin is fine).

• Familiarity with React and Next.js on the frontend.

• Cloud infrastructure experience in GCP, AWS, or Azure in production.

• Experience integrating multiple model providers (such as Gemini, Anthropic, or OpenAI) into production systems is a plus.

• Exposure to document processing, PDF parsing, or unstructured data extraction is a plus.

• A high career slope: each role showing increasing ownership, scope, and impact.

• Based in the San Francisco Bay Area or clearly willing to relocate.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary: $200,000 to $300,000 annually. Equity: 0.5% to 2.0%. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

Full-time, fully on-site in San Francisco, California.