Founding Engineer

Wordware•San Francisco, CA

9d•$200,000 - $350,000•Onsite

About The Position

We're in the middle of an AI war. Every week a new agent ships. The companies that win are the ones with taste: knowing what to copy, what to ignore, what to fight for, and what to ship before it's perfect. That judgment, bolted onto the ability to actually build it yourself (and fast), is the single most important skill right now. We need one person who embodies that. A founder-type IC who pulls a team along by force of shipping velocity and taste. Decides what to build, watches the competition, makes the hard simplification calls (“we don't need this, cut it”), ships it themselves or pairs to ship it in days. The team watches and absorbs the standard. Pace by example. A senior engineer takes a spec and builds it well. This person picks the spec. Shu Ding at Vercel set the engineering standard for the whole company through IC output alone. The engineers behind AutoGPT and BabyAGI saw the agent wave before anyone else and just built. The early Cursor team shipped an AI-native editor while everyone else debated architecture. That energy.

Requirements

Built and shipped an AI product to real users. Something people used and came back to.
Deep in the agentic AI space: agents, tool use, memory systems, autonomous workflows. Has opinions about what works and what's hype.
Writes production code at speed. Comfortable with our stack or can learn it in days.
Product taste: looks at a user flow and knows what's wrong without being told.
Zero ego about code quality vs. shipping speed in the current phase.
Senior enough to push back on architecture decisions when they're blocking shipping. (Seniority measured in output and judgment, not years.)
Founder energy: doesn't wait for specs, sees gaps and fills them. Has probably started something — YC founder, failed startup, side project with real users.
Can context-switch. Monday: debugging a sandbox reliability issue. Tuesday: redesigning an onboarding flow. Wednesday: evaluating whether to build or buy a billing integration.

Responsibilities

Ship production features in your first week.
Watch the competitive landscape daily. Know what to copy, what to ignore, what to invent.
Make the simplification calls. “We don't need this. Cut it. Ship without it.”
Pair with engineers to unblock them. Through code, not architecture docs.
Care about what the user actually experiences. Every stuck conversation, every confusing flow, every extra click.
Push back when “this is incredibly difficult and can't be estimated” is used as a reason to stall. Everything can be scoped down.