Founding Engineer - Software
About The Position
The company is building uRun — Universal Runtime, a platform designed to enable real-time, stateful AI inference. This platform allows AI to respond instantly, maintain context across a session, and be directed during its operation. They have successfully addressed the challenge of real-time AI video generation, creating live, steerable, continuous video that responds in real-time. As an infrastructure company, they provide the foundational layer upon which model labs, builders, and research teams can develop their applications. The Founding Engineer will be responsible for building the services, APIs, and core application systems that power uRun's runtime, enabling product and applied AI teams to build on the real-time inference platform. This role focuses on low-latency, high-throughput systems, real-time interaction, evolving session state, and reliable request handling under heavy compute and concurrency. The engineer will collaborate closely with product, infrastructure, and applied AI teams in an early-stage environment where architectural decisions are still being made.
Requirements
- 7+ years building and shipping backend software in production
- Proficiency in one or more backend languages — Python, Go, or TypeScript/Node.js
- Experience designing APIs, service-oriented systems, and distributed application components
- Solid understanding of cloud infrastructure, containers, and modern deployment workflows
- Ability to reason about performance, concurrency, reliability, and debugging in complex systems
- Experience with real-time, interactive, streaming, or latency-sensitive systems
Nice To Haves
- WebRTC or WebSockets for real-time communication
- AI infrastructure, inference-adjacent systems, media pipelines, or event-driven architectures
- Kubernetes, observability tooling, and hands-on production operations
- Early-stage startup experience — owning problems end-to-end and moving quickly with limited scaffolding
Responsibilities
- Build and maintain backend services, APIs, and internal platform components that power uRun's real-time inference runtime
- Design systems for real-time interaction, evolving session state, and scalable request handling across production environments
- Partner with infrastructure and platform engineers to keep services observable, reliable, and efficient under heavy compute and concurrency
- Translate experimental AI capabilities into robust, user-facing software, working closely with product and applied AI teams
- Shape architecture decisions on data flow, service boundaries, performance optimisation, and fault tolerance for interactive systems
- Raise engineering quality through testing, monitoring, code review, documentation, and sound operational practice
Benefits
- Competitive salary and meaningful equity
- Health, dental, and vision — full coverage
- 401(k) — company-supported retirement savings
- FSA/HSA — flexible spending accounts for healthcare costs
- Paid time off — we trust you to manage your time
- Top-tier tooling — access to the best AI tools available: Claude, Codex, Kimi, and whatever else helps you move faster
- MacBook Pro and AirPods — the hardware you need, on us
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Entry Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
