Founding Engineer

Recruiting From Scratch•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

Recruiting from Scratch is recruiting a founding engineer for a seed-stage, Y-Combinator- and Antler-backed AI security company. The company discovers and controls AI at the endpoint, giving security teams visibility and control over AI agents and MCP servers used by employees. Its platform is deployed in enterprise environments, and the company is defining endpoint security for AI as a category. This is a senior, hands-on role working directly with the founders and the existing team on the core product and problems without established answers. The engineer will have significant input into product direction and ownership of how the work is built. The team moves quickly and expects long hours and high intensity, particularly around launches and customer deployments. This is not a ticket-based role; the engineer will help decide what to build. The role offers a base salary of $150,000–$180,000 and a founding equity grant of 1–2%. As the first founding engineer, the hire will have substantial influence over the product and company, and their code is expected to run at real enterprises within weeks.

Requirements

2–5 years of backend or AI engineering experience, including shipping and owning production systems at early-stage startups.
Strong Golang skills.
Hands-on cloud infrastructure experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP, including deploying, operating, and debugging systems.
Hands-on experience using LLMs and APIs in production, not only prototypes.
Ability to independently turn rough direction into shipped product.
Fluency with AI coding tools and understanding of the code produced.
Willingness to take a leap for a potentially career-changing opportunity.

Nice To Haves

Experience as a tech lead, even for a team of only 1–2 engineers, while remaining hands-on.
If AI is the candidate's core strength, experience building custom models, ideally small distilled classification models that run efficiently on CPU.
Experience building and shipping cybersecurity products.
Experience with endpoints (macOS, Windows, or Linux) or browser extensions.
Experience with model distillation, quantization, or on-device inference.

Responsibilities

Own a meaningful part of the product end-to-end, from design through production.
Build and scale backend services in Golang and Node.js.
Work across the cross-platform endpoint agent, policy-enforcement proxy, backend platform, security detection pipeline, and open-source pentesting tools.
Build AI-powered detection capabilities using LLMs and smaller task-specific models where appropriate.
Build LLM-powered features and pipelines and harden them for production at enterprise scale.
Own cloud infrastructure across AWS, Azure, or GCP, including deployment, reliability, and cost.
Set the engineering bar through architecture, code review, and practices that future hires will inherit.
Talk to users and use their feedback to guide product development.
Help lead engineers who join after the hire.