Founding AI Engineer
Founding engineer at a seed-stage, four-person startup building AI agents that work as IT technicians for SMBs via managed service providers. You'd work directly with the founders across the whole product — LLM agent systems, distributed backend infrastructure, and customer-facing features — on-site in San Francisco.
- Compensation
- $175K–$220K / yr
- Location
- San Francisco, California, United States
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Not specified
- Employment
- Full time
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Ai engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Two to five years building software across the full stack
- Track record of shipping production systems and living with them, at roughly fifty customers or more
- Practical command of LLM APIs, prompt engineering, and agent architectures
- Founding-engineer disposition: shipped side projects and readiness for early-stage pace and commitment
- Clear communication, ability to simplify complicated problems, and decisiveness about priorities
Nice to have
- AI agents or tool-using LLM systems run in production, not just prototyped
- Time at an early-stage startup between seed and Series C
- Exposure to enterprise IT, security, or identity management
- Bachelor's degree in computer science or a comparable technical field
- Depth in distributed systems and backend infrastructure
- Comfort owning front-end product work as well as the layers beneath it
Full description
San Francisco, CA · On-site (5 days per week) · Full-timeCompensation: $175,000 to $220,000 + competitive early-stage equity
About the Company
Our client is a seed-stage company building AI agents that work as IT technicians for small and midsize businesses, delivered through the managed service providers that support them. The agents investigate support tickets, work across the systems technicians use every day, and take approved actions on their behalf. The company is backed by a top-tier venture firm, has signed customer contracts, and is seeing adoption ahead of plan in a global IT services market worth roughly $500B. The longer-term ambition is to become the IT infrastructure layer for small and midsize businesses, moving beyond ticket resolution into networking, security, backups, and data management.
Founded 2024 · 4 people · Industry: AI, B2B, Enterprise, Security
The Role
This is a founding engineering seat on a team of four. You would work directly with the founders across the entire product, from the distributed infrastructure underneath it to the agents themselves to the features customers touch. The team is in the office together five days a week, jams on problems in person, and leans hard on AI across its own internal work.
What you'll be doing
- Building and improving AI agents that investigate and resolve IT support tickets across live customer environments
- Scaling infrastructure and distributed systems to keep pace with customer growth and reliability demands
- Shipping across a wide surface area, frontend through backend through integrations, driven by direct customer feedback
- Working alongside the founders day to day on a roadmap that moves quickly
- Optionally sitting with customers to understand their problems and shape where the product goes
Requirements
- Two to five years building software across the full stack
- A track record of shipping production systems and then living with them, at a scale of roughly fifty customers or more
- Practical command of LLM APIs, prompt engineering, and agent architectures
- A founding-engineer disposition: side projects you actually ship, and readiness for the pace and commitment an early team demands
- Clear communication, the ability to make a complicated problem simple, and decisiveness about what matters first
Nice to Haves
- AI agents or tool-using LLM systems you have run in production, not just prototyped
- Time at an early-stage startup, somewhere between seed and Series C