Founding Engineer

Recruiting From Scratch•San Francisco, CA

22h•Onsite

About The Position

Our client is building infrastructure required to secure and control the most powerful forms of artificial intelligence. The company helps large enterprises observe, secure, and optimize their internal AI usage at massive scale, providing visibility into what models and agents are doing, what they access, what they cost, and the risks associated with their actions. The company is operating at an extremely early stage with a very small founding engineering team and is already working with major enterprise customers. The platform is focused on securing the emerging world of cloud-based AI agents by combining real-time telemetry, identity, security infrastructure, behavioral analysis, and AI-powered detection and enforcement. The founding team brings deep experience across AI security, enterprise software, infrastructure, and high-scale engineering organizations, with the company backed by leading technology investors and experienced enterprise technology operators. As a Founding Engineer, you'll have significant ownership over the platform's architecture and technical direction while building systems that secure AI agents and enterprise AI infrastructure at unprecedented scale. This is an opportunity to work directly with enterprise customers, build real-time AI security infrastructure, solve difficult distributed systems and machine learning problems, and operate as one of the earliest technical members of a highly ambitious company.

Requirements

0–5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including exceptional internship or early-career experience
Strong backend or full-stack engineering background
Proven experience shipping production software
Experience building and deploying production systems at high-quality engineering organizations
Experience owning technical features or systems end-to-end
Strong ability to operate in highly ambiguous and fast-moving environments
Strong technical ownership and execution ability
Comfortable shipping directly to enterprise customers
Ability to operate independently with minimal structure or scaffolding
Strong interest in AI security, distributed systems, machine learning, or infrastructure
Comfortable taking broad technical responsibility despite limited organizational structure
Demonstrated ability to learn complex technical domains quickly
Strong builder mentality and willingness to work at founding-stage intensity
Strong backend engineering fundamentals
Strong full-stack engineering capabilities
Strong understanding of distributed systems
Experience building production data infrastructure
Experience with cloud infrastructure and production deployments
Experience with APIs, services, and backend architectures
Strong software architecture and systems thinking
Strong debugging and production troubleshooting capabilities
Ability to reason about latency, scalability, reliability, and system performance
Ability to work across backend, infrastructure, security, AI, and data systems
Ability to learn unfamiliar technologies and technical domains quickly
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or related technical field preferred
Equivalent practical engineering experience accepted
Strong computer science, systems, algorithms, and software engineering fundamentals
Exceptional technical ownership
Strong analytical and problem-solving ability
Deep technical curiosity
Strong systems thinking
Strong builder mentality
Comfortable working with significant ambiguity
Strong communication skills
Comfortable working directly with founders
Comfortable working directly with enterprise customers
High execution velocity
Strong bias toward shipping
Strong ability to reason from first principles
Comfortable making technical decisions independently
Strong architectural judgment
Low-ego collaborative mentality
Comfortable operating with minimal scaffolding
Strong product intuition
Strong customer orientation
Comfortable receiving and incorporating direct customer feedback
Comfortable working in a highly intense early-stage environment
Strong willingness to work onsite in San Francisco
Comfortable operating with a high degree of responsibility at an extremely early-stage company
Strong interest in AI security, agentic systems, and emerging infrastructure

Nice To Haves

Experience working with high-scale or technically complex systems preferred
Experience working in startup or high-intensity engineering environments preferred
Experience with streaming pipelines or real-time data systems preferred
Experience with Go, Rust, or comparable systems programming languages preferred
Experience working with high-volume data ingestion systems
Experience with machine learning or applied ML preferred
Experience with LLMs or AI systems preferred
Experience with model post-training or inference systems preferred
Experience building low-latency production systems preferred
Experience with security engineering or cybersecurity systems preferred
Experience with EDR, identity, network, or security integrations preferred

Responsibilities

Own and ship entire product features end-to-end that go live with enterprise customers within weeks
Build the data plane responsible for ingesting an enterprise's AI footprint
Design high-volume data ingestion systems for heterogeneous telemetry from EDR, network, identity, and model gateways
Build real-time detection and policy enforcement systems for novel AI agent failure modes
Design and implement real-time data infrastructure for enterprise AI workloads
Work directly with enterprise customers during proof-of-concepts and deployments
Ship product capabilities directly in response to customer requirements and feedback
Build systems capable of processing large-scale AI telemetry with strict latency requirements
Train and deploy small models for fast inline behavioral judgments
Develop behavioral baselines and detection systems for AI agents and enterprise AI activity
Red-team AI models and agents to identify failures before they reach customers
Identify and mitigate prompt injection, tool misuse, data exfiltration, and scope drift risks
Build security systems capable of evaluating AI agent behavior in real time
Work across distributed systems, streaming pipelines, machine learning, and security infrastructure
Design scalable architectures for high-volume real-time enterprise workloads
Shape the technical architecture and engineering direction of the platform
Make critical technical decisions across infrastructure, backend systems, security, and AI systems
Work closely with founders and the founding engineering team on product and technical strategy
Operate with minimal scaffolding in a highly ambiguous and fast-moving environment
Own production reliability, performance, scalability, and operational outcomes
Work directly with customers rather than relying exclusively on sales or product teams
Translate customer problems into technical solutions and shipped software
Continuously improve the platform's detection, security, performance, and reliability

Benefits

Base Salary: $200,000 – $400,000
Significant early-stage equity, with 1%+ possible for founding engineers
Compensation scales with experience
Opportunity to join an extremely early-stage founding engineering team
Significant ownership over platform architecture and technical direction
Opportunity to build AI security infrastructure from the ground up
Opportunity to work directly with major enterprise customers
Exposure to distributed systems, streaming infrastructure, AI security, and machine learning
Opportunity to solve novel problems across security, inference, post-training, and real-time systems
Direct collaboration with founders and founding engineers
High-impact environment with rapid product iteration
Opportunity to shape engineering standards and technical culture
Visa transfer and sponsorship support