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.