Founding Engineer
Founding Engineer at Zatanna (YC), building infrastructure that turns applications into programmable read/write APIs so AI agents can operate software reliably. Day to day: reverse engineering web, desktop, and legacy systems, scaling integration infrastructure, and working directly with customers across healthcare, logistics, and enterprise software.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- US
- Work setup
- Onsite
- Seniority
- Not specified
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Strong experience with reverse engineering, backend engineering, distributed systems, or infrastructure
- Comfortable working with browser internals, HTTP requests, network traffic, authentication flows, and undocumented APIs
- Ability to independently investigate unfamiliar systems and figure out how they work
- Experience building production-grade systems where reliability, performance, and scalability matter
- Comfortable moving quickly, juggling multiple priorities, and owning problems end to end
- Strong communication skills and willingness to work directly with customers
- High agency, technical curiosity, and a bias toward shipping
Full description
Zatanna is building the infrastructure that allows AI agents to interact with any software by turning applications into real, programmable APIs.
AI agents are increasingly capable of performing work that was previously done by humans, but they're still constrained by software interfaces designed for people. Today, agents rely heavily on clicking buttons, navigating pages, and interacting with UIs to get things done. This approach is slow, fragile, and difficult to scale.
At Zatanna, we're changing that. We reverse engineer applications to turn their underlying workflows and actions into reliable, read-and-write APIs, regardless of whether those applications offer APIs themselves. From modern cloud applications and web portals to retail websites to legacy desktop software and on-premises systems, we're making the world's software programmatically accessible.
Our goal is to become the infrastructure layer that connects AI agents to the software that runs the real world.
About the Role
Zatanna is looking for a Founding Engineer with deep expertise in reverse engineering and infrastructure to work directly alongside the founders to build and scale our core technology.
You'll be responsible for creating and maintaining integrations across web portals, cloud applications, and on-premise software, often working with systems that have little to no documentation and were never designed for programmatic access.
This is a highly technical, hands-on role that involves close customer communication, tight deadlines, and frequent context switching across industries like healthcare, logistics, and enterprise software.
What you'll work on:
- Reverse engineer web applications, desktop software, and legacy systems to create reliable read/write APIs.
- Build and scale the infrastructure responsible for running, monitoring, and maintaining integrations across thousands of customer environments.
- Solve challenging problems involving authentication, session management, browser automation, network protocols, and undocumented APIs.
- Develop robust systems for interacting with on-premise software through RDP, virtual machines, and other remote access methods.
- Work directly with customers to understand their technical requirements, troubleshoot issues, and ship solutions quickly.
- Design systems that can recover gracefully from UI changes, application updates, and unexpected failures.
- Help shape the engineering culture, architecture, and technical direction of Zatanna from the ground up.
Who we're looking for:
- Strong experience with reverse engineering, backend engineering, distributed systems, or infrastructure.