Founding Engineer

San Francisco, CA · On-site · Full-time
Compensation: $250,000–$400,000 + 0.25%–2% equity

About the Company

An early-stage, seed-funded startup (founded 2024, 1–10 people) building AI-native production observability and automatic error resolution. Their system flags, triages, root-causes, and fixes production code errors before users notice — identifying the single root cause and delivering a fix to the responsible engineer with no prompting required. They publish a benchmark of 86% root-cause accuracy. Backed by $10M in seed funding with live enterprise customers already onboard.

Founded 2024 · 1–10 people · Industry: AI Tools / Dev Tools

The Role

A Founding Engineer role building the systems that deliver accurate root-cause analysis to clients. You won't be limited to full-stack, infra, or support — as the company grows you'll be pulled across all of these problem areas, with real influence over system design, architecture, and product direction from day one.

What you'll be doing

• Building multi-agent reasoning systems that use real telemetry to produce correct root cause analyses
• Getting handed problems no one has ever seen and coming up with solutions, like automating error analysis
• Setting up telemetry pipelines, improving tooling and SDKs, and building systems that reconstruct timelines across logs, traces, and deploys
• Building automatic instrumentation that tracks code behavior, preserves async context, and improves visibility into backend operations
• Helping build not just the systems that deliver correct RCA, but the systems that build those systems

Tech stack: TypeScript, Node.js, Next.js, Vercel, AWS; multi-agent systems, telemetry, observability, production debugging

Requirements

• Level 3 autonomy, operates independently without being managed
• 1+ years using AI to solve complex unstructured problems
• Strong communication, translates complex ideas into simple clear language
• Demonstrable evidence of edge, clearly exceptional in some way
• Background at a high-signal dev tools or AI company
• Based in or relocating to San Francisco

Green Flags

• Background at xAI, Affirm (pre-2021), Cursor, Ramp, Retool (2017 to 2021), Perplexity, DataDog, Sentry, or equivalent, strongest signal of the caliber the team is looking for
• Has used AI to solve genuinely hard, unstructured problems in production, not just fine-tuned models or run pipelines
• Curious and always building, merely reading is not enough, they have to get hands on with whatever their curiosity unearths
• Gritty and courageous, does not linger in their comfort zone, swims upstream to achieve goals
• Can estimate with high confidence quickly and manage projects with notable competence
• Has worked at the product scope, not just feature or task level, understands the full PSHE cycle

Red Flags

• Entrepreneur in residence of any kind
• Last role was a manager with minimal coding (different than a tech lead)
• Anyone pushed out of FAANG in the last two years
• Prior work that can be summed up as data pipelines
• Background at Salesforce or similarly slow-moving enterprise companies
• Taking orders from VC
• Does not have demonstrable evidence of a clear edge, average engineers do not make the bar here
• Active manager, the team needs builders not people managers
• Consultant Background

Why Join

• Founding-level ownership and influence over architecture and product direction from day one
• Work on genuinely hard, unstructured AI problems in production — not pipelines or fine-tuning
• Strong seed backing and live customers, with relocation fully covered

Details

• Location: San Francisco, CA
• Work policy: Fully in-person
• Compensation: $250,000–$400,000 + equity
• Visa sponsorship: H-1B transfers, TN (Canada and Mexico), OPT to H-1B, H-1B1 Singapore, E-3 Australia
• Employment type: Full-time