Founding Engineer

San Francisco, California

Software Engineering

Permanent

Our client, an AI startup in the eCommerce industry, are hiring a Founding Engineer to join their growing team in San Francisco. The successful candidate will take full ownership of the product, from system architecture and infrastructure to customer deployments and rapid iteration cycles.

Responsibilities

Deliver production-grade features across the platform, including voice agents, workflow automation, memory systems and customer-facing applications.
Design and implement a real-time voice pipeline with sub-second response latency.
Develop and refine our memory architecture using vector databases to ensure all interactions are contextually aware.
Build and maintain enterprise integrations across systems such as Salesforce, HubSpot and custom CRM/ERP platforms.
Design multi-tenant infrastructure capable of scaling from 10 to 10,000+ organisations.
Own key technical decisions, including model selection, infrastructure trade-offs, build vs. buy choices and overall system architecture.
Work directly with customers to understand their workflows and translate them into shipped product features.

Skillset

At least 2 years of experience building production software, ideally full-stack with TypeScript/React and strong backend engineering capability.
Practical experience with LLM systems beyond tutorials, including RAG, embeddings, tool use, prompt engineering and evaluation.
Comfortable working with real-time systems such as WebSockets, streaming pipelines, telephony, or audio infrastructure.
Strong systems thinking and architectural judgement with ability to make fast, high-quality trade-offs informed by prior shipped work.
Customer-first mindset with ability to translate conversations into product decisions and shipped features.
High ownership mentality suited to a founding role, with corresponding responsibility and equity.
Familiarity with Next.js, PostgreSQL, Redis, Twilio, LiveKit, OpenAI, Anthropic, Deepgram and vector databases is a bonus.