Founding Engineer
Job Description: Seniority 5 - 15 years of experience in full-stack engineering at a VC-backed tech startup (Seed to Series B) Work experience Experience building AI agents and frameworks Experience with voice AI (e.g., Deepgram, Vapi) Education Undergrad in CS from top 50 school Hard skills Proficiency in Node.js and React Experience building with LLM APIs (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic) Infrastructure ownership: AWS Lambda, ECS, Docker deployments Soft skills Highly autonomous, product-minded, and self-driven owner Miscellaneous Prefer candidates in Bay Area (SF or Oakland), open to remote candidates in PST or CST Traits to avoid Career freelancers, consultants, or IT services backgrounds Experience exclusively at large, enterprise, slow-moving companies e.g. SAP, JP Morgan History of very short tenures (e.g., 5 jobs in 4 years) About this role We are looking for a Founding Engineer Lead with 5+ years of experience to join our founding team and help build our new, stealth HR tech product. You'll be a thought partner to the founders, making key infrastructure and architecture decisions for our AI-native solution from the ground up. This is a zero-to-one opportunity to build agentic workflows and voice AI systems that automate end-to-end human processes. What will you be doing? Design and ship agentic AI pipelines from scratch, creating multi-step, tool-using, and self-correcting workflows. Build and iterate on real-time voice AI systems, tackling challenges like low-latency speech pipelines, turn-taking logic, and interruption handling. Own infrastructure and architecture decisions for our new platform, thinking through the right approach for an early-stage product. Act as a thought partner to the founders on product strategy, contributing ideas and shaping the roadmap beyond just executing a spec. Help scale the engineering team and set the culture as an early, pivotal member of the team. Tech stackReact.js · Node.js · Express · PostgreSQL · AWS · LLM APIs (Anthropic, Gemini, OpenAI) · Voice AI (Deepgram, ElevenLabs, or equiv.) · Agent frameworks (LangGraph, CrewAI, or custom)