Founding Engineer

Title of Role: Founding Engineer
Location: Palo Alto, CA (On-site, 5 days/week)
Company Stage of Funding: Seed (~$5M raised)
Office Type: On-site
Salary: $150,000 – $200,000 + Equity (0.3% – 0.7%)

Company Description

Our client is an early-stage, seed-funded startup building a headcount management platform for enterprise organizations. Their product serves as a single source of truth across finance, HR, and recruiting teams—ensuring alignment across hiring plans, budgets, and real-time organizational changes.

Founded by former leaders from Bolt who scaled engineering and product teams from <50 to 900 employees, the company is tackling a critical and underserved problem in workforce planning.

Despite being early, they already have strong traction with 7 enterprise customers, including companies like Affirm, Nextdoor, Intercom, Mercury, and Discord.

With a lean team of just 3 people, they are now hiring founding engineers to help build the product from the ground up and reach product-market fit.

What You Will Do

• Own product development end-to-end, from technical design to production deployment


• Ship quickly while balancing speed vs. quality trade-offs


• Collaborate directly with founders on product direction and technical decisions


• Work closely with customers to understand pain points and deliver solutions


• Build scalable systems and data models for enterprise use cases


• Take ownership of large product areas with minimal oversight


• Debug, iterate, and improve product experience based on real user feedback


• Wear multiple hats across engineering, product, and customer support

Ideal Candidate Background

• 2+ years of experience in full-stack software engineering


• Strong ability to build and ship products end-to-end


• Experience working in startup environments or high-ownership roles


• Comfortable working directly with customers and shaping product direction


• Strong system design and data modeling skills


• Ability to quickly learn new technologies and adapt across the stack


• Product-minded engineer who cares about user experience and business impact

Preferred

• Experience at VC-backed startups or as a founding/early engineer


• Background in B2B SaaS products


• Exposure to HR, finance, or workforce planning tools


• Strong academic background in Computer Science or Engineering


• Experience working on zero-to-one products

Compensation and Benefits

• Competitive base salary: $150,000 – $200,000


• Equity: 0.3% – 0.7%


• Visa sponsorship available (H1B transfers only)


• High ownership and direct impact as a founding team member


• Opportunity to work closely with experienced founders


• Early-stage equity upside in a fast-growing company

Why Join

This is a rare opportunity to join a seed-stage startup with strong early traction and build a category-defining product in workforce planning.

You’ll work directly with founders, own major parts of the product, and have a meaningful impact on both the technical direction and customer experience.

If you’re looking for high ownership, fast growth, and the chance to build something from the ground up, this role offers exceptional upside.