Founding Engineer
📍 San Francisco, CA · Onsite · Seed stage
About the company
Our client is a seed-stage AI startup transforming how the world’s largest manufacturers run their commercial operations. While factories have been automated for decades, sales, customer service, field service, order management and marketing still run on manual handoffs across ERPs, CRMs and legacy systems. This company is changing that.
They build production-grade AI agents that work inside real enterprise environments, on top of Salesforce, SAP and custom systems, for manufacturing, automotive, energy and industrial companies with $1B+ in revenue across the US and Europe. Their deployments are already delivering measurable results with leading global manufacturers: faster quotes, lower cost per case and new revenue streams.
The founders met at Stanford and bring deep experience leading machine learning at an AI company acquired by a major tech player, and building field service products at one of the world’s largest enterprise software companies. The company is backed by top-tier VCs and former C-level executives from leading consulting and enterprise software firms.
The role
As one of the first engineers, you’ll build both the core AI platform and the agents deployed with customers. It’s a hybrid of platform engineering and forward deployed engineering: you’ll build agent frameworks, ship agents into production for enterprise clients, and work directly with their IT teams. Over time, you can choose to lean toward the platform or the forward deployed path.
What you’ll build
Agent systems: orchestration, memory, tool use, long-running agent infrastructure, evals and agent runtime
Customer deployments: production agents integrated with Salesforce, SAP and other enterprise systems
Platform and product: core product experiences and lightweight applications on top of the platform
Infrastructure: cloud infrastructure and deployment (Kubernetes, Terraform). Familiarity helps; deep expertise isn’t required
What they’re looking for
6–8 years of software engineering experience
Experience at an early-stage startup (founder experience is a big plus)
Comfortable across the stack, from infrastructure to application code
Hands-on experience building with LLMs and AI agents in production
Strong sense of craft: you care how things are built, not just whether they work, and you don’t ship sloppy AI-generated code
End-to-end ownership, balancing quality and speed
Product mindset and comfort working with enterprise clients
Curiosity about how physical industries operate
What to expect
This is a founding role at a fast-moving company, and the pace is intense. It’s built for people who want maximum ownership and impact early in a company’s life. The team is small and flat, organized around customers.
Interview process
Technical screen (AI tools allowed) → System design → Take-home project and debrief.