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 .