Founding Engineer

Job Description

### 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**.