Founding Software Engineer - Backend
About The Position
Hypercubic is building AI systems to understand, reason about, and rearchitect large-scale legacy applications running on mainframes and COBOL. The company operates at the intersection of program analysis, knowledge extraction, and agentic systems, serving critical enterprise software across industries including banking, insurance, airlines, and government. This founding backend engineering role works directly with the CTO to design, prototype, and productionize AI-powered systems from first principles. The engineer will have meaningful ownership over architecture, product direction, and engineering culture, and will work across abstraction layers, from low-level system reasoning to high-level interactions. The role is in person five days a week in San Francisco, California, near FiDi.
Requirements
- Care deeply about the work and product.
- Be comfortable with uncertainty and enjoy determining what to build before deciding how to build it.
- Have built complex agentic products or infrastructure.
- Think in systems and feedback loops, not just features.
- Be able to prototype ideas quickly and build enterprise-grade features to a high-quality bar.
- Have a strong desire to become world-class at AI engineering.
- Show a bias for action and a track record of working with urgency in fast-paced environments.
Nice To Haves
- Strong testing intuition, including TDD and property-based testing.
- Experience building and maintaining production-grade agentic or autonomous systems.
- Exposure to legacy systems, especially mainframes or COBOL, compilers, program analysis techniques, or high-performance computing (HPC).
- Familiarity with enterprise software constraints.
Responsibilities
- Rapidly prototype concepts and features to validate ideas before full implementation.
- Ship AI-driven features end to end, from model interaction to user-facing workflows.
- Establish early engineering standards for testing, reliability, and code quality.
- Translate ambiguous problem statements into concrete experiments, constraints, and working systems.
- Lead architecture decisions and long-term technical direction with the CTO.
- Collaborate with subject matter experts and customers across industries, including banking, insurance, and airlines.
Benefits
- Founding-team-level equity.
- Medical, dental, and vision benefits for the employee and their family.
- Life insurance benefits.
- Retirement plan, such as a 401(k).
- Monthly stipend to support wellness and commuting.
- Daily lunches, dinners, and snacks in the office.
- Generous paid time off and sick day policy.
- Relocation support as needed.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
