Founding Full-Stack Engineer (exclusive)

Who is Recruiting from Scratch:

Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers, software, and hardware talent at innovative companies. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across the United States to help them hire.

Founding Full-Stack Engineer

Location

Palo Alto, CA (On-site)

On-site role requiring five days per week in-office in Palo Alto, CA.

Compensation

$200,000 – $650,000 Base + Competitive Equity

Visa

Open to Visa Transfers (OPT, H1B Transfers) + O-1 Visa Sponsorship

Company Stage

Early Stage – Seed

Industry

Artificial Intelligence, Fintech, Consumer Finance, Financial Technology, Agentic AI, Trading Infrastructure, Financial Automation

About the Company

Our client is building an AI execution layer for consumer finance, transforming natural language intent into real financial actions.

The company is developing technology that allows users to express financial theses in natural language and have AI agents translate those ideas into tested strategies that can ultimately be executed and settled across financial markets.

The company is operating with a very small, highly technical founding team and is backed by leading technology and financial investors.

As one of the first engineering hires, you'll have significant ownership over the product, technical architecture, engineering culture, and development practices from the ground up.

This is an opportunity to work across conversational interfaces, AI agent loops, strategy execution infrastructure, financial integrations, and customer-facing product development while helping define what the company builds next.

What You'll Do

• Own the product surface end-to-end from initial concept through production deployment

• Build conversational interfaces that allow users to express financial theses and intent in natural language

• Develop chat-first product experiences with artifact panes and interactive workflows

• Build AI agent loops that translate user intent into tested financial strategies

• Design and build strategy execution infrastructure that takes proposed strategies into live execution

• Build systems that connect strategies to exchanges, prediction markets, and on-chain venues

• Own end-to-end product flows spanning frontend experiences, backend systems, AI agents, and execution infrastructure

• Take product ideas from initial sketches through implementation, testing, deployment, and iteration

• Hunt for product opportunities and identify what the platform should build next

• Independently define technical scope and propose product improvements

• Own multiple projects simultaneously from genesis through completion

• Make architecture and technical decisions across the full product stack

• Establish engineering protocols, development workflows, and code review practices

• Help define engineering standards and culture for the growing technical organization

• Build reliable infrastructure for financial strategy execution and settlement

• Integrate new asset classes into the platform end-to-end

• Design APIs, backend services, product interfaces, and agent workflows

• Work closely with founders to translate product vision into shipped software

• Operate with a high degree of autonomy and minimal predefined process

• Make pragmatic technical decisions in highly ambiguous environments

• Balance shipping velocity with reliability, correctness, and production quality

• Identify when additional engineering support is required and help build the team to support it

• Continuously improve product architecture, engineering processes, and user experience

Ideal Candidate Background

Experience Requirements

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience

• Backend-leaning full-stack engineering background

• Experience working at high-quality, talent-dense startups

• Proven experience owning products or major product areas end-to-end

• Experience building and shipping customer-facing products

• Experience operating in highly ambiguous startup environments

• Experience taking products from concept through production

• Strong product instincts and ability to determine what should be built

• Experience making technical and product decisions independently

• Experience working closely with founders or senior product leadership

• Experience building systems where correctness, reliability, and execution quality matter

• Strong ownership mentality with demonstrated execution ability

• Comfortable owning multiple projects without a predefined queue of work

• Experience building financial, fintech, trading, or marketplace products preferred

• Experience with AI-powered products or agentic systems preferred

• Comfortable operating as one of the earliest engineers on a team

• Strong entrepreneurial mindset and willingness to build processes from scratch

Technical Requirements

• Strong full-stack engineering experience

• Strong backend engineering fundamentals

• Strong TypeScript experience

• Strong Python experience

• Experience building production web applications

• Experience designing and building APIs and backend services

• Experience building conversational or chat-based interfaces preferred

• Experience working with AI agents or LLM-powered applications preferred

• Experience building agentic workflows preferred

• Experience designing strategy execution or workflow orchestration systems preferred

• Experience integrating external APIs and financial platforms preferred

• Experience working with exchanges, financial markets, prediction markets, or blockchain infrastructure preferred

• Strong software architecture and system design skills

• Strong understanding of production reliability and scalability

• Strong debugging and production troubleshooting capabilities

• Ability to reason across frontend, backend, AI, infrastructure, and product systems

• Ability to design systems that support real-time or transactional workflows

• Strong understanding of engineering tradeoffs and technical decision-making

• Ability to learn unfamiliar technical domains quickly

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or related technical field preferred

• Equivalent practical engineering experience accepted

• Strong computer science and software engineering fundamentals

Soft Skills

• Exceptional technical ownership

• Strong product judgment

• Strong analytical and problem-solving ability

• Entrepreneurial and builder mentality

• Strong first-principles thinking

• Comfortable working with significant ambiguity

• Strong communication skills

• Comfortable working directly with founders

• Comfortable independently identifying product opportunities

• High execution velocity

• Strong bias toward shipping

• Strong ability to make pragmatic technical tradeoffs

• Comfortable making decisions without extensive direction

• Low-ego collaborative mentality

• Strong customer and user orientation

• Strong business intuition

• Comfortable owning multiple projects simultaneously

• Comfortable establishing engineering processes from scratch

• Strong ability to operate independently

• Comfortable hiring or helping build the engineering team as the company scales

• Strong willingness to work five days per week in Palo Alto

• Strong interest in AI, fintech, financial markets, and agentic systems

Compensation & Benefits

• Base Salary: $200,000 – $650,000

• Competitive equity package

• Opportunity to be one of the first three engineering hires

• Significant ownership over product architecture and technical direction

• Opportunity to build AI-powered financial execution infrastructure from the ground up

• Direct collaboration with founders

• Opportunity to shape engineering culture, standards, and development practices

• Exposure to AI agents, financial markets, and automated strategy execution

• Opportunity to build products connecting natural language with real-world financial action

• High-impact early-stage environment with significant technical and product ownership

• Opportunity to own multiple products and systems end-to-end

• Visa transfer support

• O-1 visa sponsorship available

Why Join

This is an opportunity to become one of the earliest engineers at a company building an entirely new interface between AI and financial markets.

You'll own the complete product surface — from the conversational experience where users express their ideas, through the AI agent layer that turns those ideas into strategies, to the infrastructure that executes and settles those strategies.

You'll have an unusually high degree of autonomy and influence, with the opportunity to decide what gets built, establish engineering practices, and shape the technical foundation of the company.

If you enjoy building from scratch, making high-leverage product decisions, working directly with founders, and operating at the intersection of AI, software, and financial markets, this role offers exceptional technical and product scope.

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