Founding Engineer

Job description

### About the Role This is a founding engineering seat at a fast-growing AI-native startup building multi-modal agents across voice, SMS, and email for a vertical B2B2C market. You will own one of four core domains end-to-end, B2B product, agent layer quality, family graph infrastructure, or B2C consumer product, and make product decisions directly alongside customers, with no PM layer between you and the work. ### What You'll Do - Own an entire product domain from architecture through daily production shipping. - Join customer calls, synthesize feedback, and drive product decisions independently. - Build and optimize multi-modal agents targeting sub-500ms voice latency, high SMS response rates, and long-running conversation state across channels. - Define the quality bar for non-deterministic systems, including evals, prompt versioning, guardrails, and drift detection. - Work full-stack across React/Next.js frontends, Node.js backends, and Python voice services. ### What We're Looking For - 3 to 8 years of full-stack engineering experience, with a strong track record shipping 0-to-1 products at high-growth startups, as a founder, or within new vertical teams at top-tier tech companies. - Production proficiency in TypeScript with hands-on experience in Node.js and React/Next.js. - Proven experience building with LLM APIs or agent SDKs (such as Anthropic, OpenAI, Vercel AI SDK, or Mastra) in production systems. - Depth in at least one area: production voice or SMS agents, long-running agent state and memory, B2B2C or marketplace product architecture, or agent evals and guardrails. - Comfort making independent product decisions and conducting customer discovery without dedicated product management support. - Python experience with real-time voice pipelines (LiveKit, Deepgram, STT/TTS) or evaluation tooling (Braintrust, LLM-as-judge) is a strong plus. - Familiarity with infrastructure tools such as Redis, BullMQ, Vercel, Render, Sentry, or PostHog is a plus. - Strong CS fundamentals, a founder background with verifiable traction, or experience at a well-regarded AI-native employer rounds out the profile. - Thrives in ambiguous, early-stage environments; prefers defining processes over following them. - No visa sponsorship available. ### Compensation & Benefits Salary range: **$180,000 to $250,000 USD annually.** Equity is available given the founding-team nature of this role. No visa sponsorship is available. ### Location On-site, five days per week in **New York City, New York, USA** (Chelsea area).