Founding Engineer at HeaviAI
Founding engineer (one of the first hires) at an early-stage AI startup applying voice/agent AI to heavy-equipment repair knowledge. In-person in San Francisco: own features end-to-end, work directly with customers, and build with tools like Pipecat, Vapi, Browserbase, and Vercel AI SDK.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- San Francisco, USA
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Not specified
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Sharp, scrappy, thrives in ambiguity
- Excited to immerse yourself in a historically overlooked space
- Enjoys talking to blue collar folks and respects their embodied knowledge
- Have founded a startup before, or want to in the future
- Wants to work on real-world problems impacting real people
- Experience or strong interest with voice AI (Pipecat, Vapi), AI agents (Browserbase, Vercel AI SDK), or multimodal AI reasoning
Nice to have
- Knows how an engine works, or wants to learn
Full description
About the Role
You’ll be one of our 1st hires and founding engineer, working in-person with us and our customers across the country. You’ll own major parts of the product and have outsized influence on architecture, stack, and product direction.
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What you’ll do:
- Work directly with customers to understand problems and ship solutions fast.
- Own entire features end-to-end. UX, design, context engineering, evals, schema.
- Help shape engineering culture, practices, and team norms from day one.
- Collaborate with us on product and business decisions (this isn’t a back-seat role).
- Work with our Head of Parts Intelligence to encode tacit repair knowledge into tokens for the AI.
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You’re the right person for the job if you:
- Are sharp, scrappy, and thrive in ambiguity.
- Are excited to immerse yourself in a historically overlooked space (a character building one that you’ll want to talk about at dinner parties).
- Enjoy talking to blue collar folks, and respect the embodied knowledge they have earned.
- Have founded a startup yourself before, or want to in the future.
- Want to work on real-world problems that impact real people, not massive corporations.
- Have experience (or strong interest) with voice AI (Pipecat, Vapi), AI agents (Browserbase, Vercel AI SDK), or multimodal AI reasoning.
- [bonus] You know how an engine works! Or, you want to learn.
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The Team
We’re Mike and Sanjay repeat founders and operators who’ve been in the trenches before on 0->1 and scaled to $250M in revenue. We have a bit of grey hair, and know how to avoid the basic mistakes. You can trust us to handle the highs and lows while keeping our heads on straight. Our CTO has been a Founding Engineer before, and knows how important this role is to setting the company up to succeed.
We don’t take ourselves too seriously. Building a once in a generation business is hard enough, it’s important to have fun and enjoy working with your team while you do it.