Founding Engineer

Job Description:

Seniority

0 - 4 years of experience in full-stack software engineering, building production systems and user-facing features

Work experience

Experience at a B2B SaaS company or VC-backed tech startup e.g. Scale AI or Decagon

Experience building AI/ML products, especially with LLMs or AI agents

Education

Undergrad in CS

Olympiads, RSI (Research Science Institute), and other high school competitions

Hard skills

Systems thinking: understand distributed systems, concurrency, and performance optimization

Full-stack expertise, strong with TypeScript, React, Next.js, and Python

Soft skills

High agency and ownership; proactively identifies and solves problems

Traits to avoid

Engineers who are frontend-only

Candidates who require significant step-by-step direction to complete tasks

Individuals from large enterprise, slow-moving e.g. SAP, JP Morgan

About this role

About the role

As a Founding Engineer, you'll architect and build the core AI agents and infrastructure that power precision outbound at scale — then make them accessible through beautiful, intuitive interfaces. You'll work directly with customers, shape product direction, and own critical systems that drive revenue for 40+ YC companies and growing.

What You'll Build

• AI agents that discover hyper-targeted leads by understanding ideal customer profiles, conference attendees, hiring signals, and more.
• Real-time content monitoring systems that track what prospects are posting, sharing, and engaging with across social platforms.
• Multi-channel sequence orchestration across email and LinkedIn, managing dozens of email domains and sender accounts.
• Enterprise-grade infrastructure that scales to hundreds of concurrent users — multi-tenant architecture with role-based access control, end-to-end encryption, SOC 2-ready audit logging, and rate limiting built in from day one.
• Polished user interfaces that turn complex outbound workflows into experiences sales teams can set up in minutes.

We're Looking For

• 1–4 years of experience building production systems and user-facing features.
• Full-stack expertise — strong with TypeScript, React, Next.js, and Python. Systems thinking — you understand distributed systems, concurrency, and performance optimization.
• Product mindset — you talk to customers, understand their pain, and ship solutions that solve real problems.
• High agency — you identify problems and fix them without being asked.

Bonus Points

• Experience with AI/ML, particularly LLMs, prompt engineering, or building AI agents.
• Previous startup experience or experience building successful B2B SaaS products.
• Design sense — you can build UIs that don't just work but feel great to use.