Staff / Senior Engineer – Founding Engineer (CTO-track)
About The Position
Varick is the #1 applied AI company on the planet, helping massive enterprise businesses transform from the ground up with AI nativity. Dozens of companies reach out every week, ranging from $1B to $100B in annual revenue, with individual client contracts reaching seven- to eight-figure ARR. Most large companies spend over 50% of their time on manual processes that are too complex for traditional automation and too repetitive for talented employees — Varick builds the AI agents that take over these processes, then stays embedded long-term to monitor, optimize, and continuously upgrade them. The team comes from Meta, AWS Bedrock, Citadel Securities, McKinsey, and Stanford. Backed by Work-Bench and Evan Moore (co-founder of DoorDash). Latest valuation: $30M. 100% production success rate vs. industry average of 5–13%. The Founding Engineer at Varick owns the technical direction of the entire platform. You design the architecture, set the engineering standards, and make the build-vs-buy decisions that determine whether Varick becomes a generational platform or stays a services business. This is not a senior IC seat inside someone else's org — you are the person defining the system. Direct path to CTO.
Requirements
- 6+ years of software engineering, with 2+ years as staff, principal, or founding engineer
- Deep production AI/ML systems experience: inference, orchestration, evaluation, and monitoring — not just fine-tuning notebooks
- Built and shipped systems at a top AI lab (Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Meta FAIR) OR as a founding/senior engineer at a high-growth AI startup
- Strong systems design instincts: architects for reliability, scale, and iteration speed simultaneously
- Ownership mentality; high agency — does not wait for requirements documents or permission
- Recruits well: people want to work with you
- Based in SF or willing to relocate; 5 days in-person in FiDi
- No visa sponsorship available
Nice To Haves
- Agent systems, compound AI workflows, or LLM-powered applications in production
- Background in process mining, workflow automation, or enterprise integration
- Infrastructure depth: Kubernetes, distributed systems, cloud architecture
- Previous founding engineer or CTO experience at a venture-backed startup
- Enterprise environment experience: real security, compliance, and reliability requirements
- Published research or significant open-source contributions in AI/ML
Responsibilities
- Own the technical architecture: Design and build the core platform — agent orchestration, process mining infrastructure, diagnostic pipelines, and the control plane that turns audit outputs into deployed AI systems
- Build production AI systems at scale: Multi-step agents, retrieval pipelines, evaluation frameworks, human-in-the-loop governance running inside Fortune 5000 environments
- Ship fast, iterate faster: Varick ships to production weekly. Drive engineering velocity, cut scope ruthlessly
- Build the engineering organization: Recruit, mentor, and lead engineers from 5 to 50
- Bridge research and production: Translate frontier work (foundation models, agent frameworks, inference optimization, tool use, long-context reasoning) into production systems
Benefits
- Founding team scope and ownership of entire technical vision
- Direct path to CTO
- Build platform, not features
- 100% deployment rate with immediate measurable impact
- Direct access to Fortune 5000 decision-makers
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
