Founding Engineer (AI Systems)

About the job

Job Title: Founding Engineer (AI Systems)

Salary: $150K-$250K base + competitive equity

Location: San Francisco, CA (6 days in-office)

Visa sponsorship and relocation support available

Company Description

Venture-backed startup building the decision intelligence layer for industrial operations.

Manufacturing companies still rely on human operators to make thousands of operational decisions every day. Planning production, allocating resources, managing constraints, and responding to changing conditions often happens through spreadsheets, tribal knowledge, and manual processes.

This company is building a new class of AI systems that combine agentic reasoning, simulation, and mathematical optimization to automate those decisions at scale. Backed by top-tier investors and already delivering millions of dollars in value for customers, they're building what comes after traditional ERP software.

Job Description

Join a small, highly technical team building intelligent systems that automate complex decision-making for manufacturers and industrial companies.

As a Founding Engineer, you'll work across backend systems, infrastructure, data-intensive workflows, and AI-powered decision engines. You'll help build systems that combine large-scale industrial data, agent-based reasoning, optimization algorithms, and simulation to solve operational problems that were previously managed by experienced human operators.

This is a highly product-oriented engineering role. You'll work directly with customers, ship production systems end-to-end, and help shape both the technical architecture and product direction of the company.

Why this role is remarkable

• Work on genuinely difficult engineering problems at the intersection of AI agents, optimization, simulation, and large-scale industrial systems
• Build alongside a talent-dense team with backgrounds spanning startups, robotics, aerospace, and world-class engineering organizations
• Help redefine an industry that has seen little fundamental software innovation in decades, with enormous market potential and immediate customer impact

What you will do

• Design and build backend systems, APIs, orchestration layers, and data infrastructure powering AI-driven decision engines
• Develop production-grade agentic workflows that combine reasoning, optimization, and operational data to automate complex business decisions
• Work directly with customers to understand operational challenges, gather feedback, and rapidly ship solutions that deliver measurable value
• Contribute across the stack when needed, including frontend features, infrastructure, deployment systems, and product architecture

The ideal candidate

• 3 to 8 years of software engineering experience, ideally at high-growth startups or exceptionally demanding technical environments
• Strong backend engineering skills in Python, with experience building production systems that operate at scale
• Comfortable owning features end-to-end, from architecture and implementation through deployment and customer feedback
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, containerization, databases, and modern developer tooling

Discover our full range of relocation jobs with comprehensive support packages to help you relocate and settle in your new location.

• Strong product instincts and a genuine desire to understand customer problems rather than simply execute tickets
• Builder mentality with evidence of ownership, whether through startup experience, side projects, open-source work, research, or previous founding experience

Bonus points

• Experience building agentic systems, AI products, orchestration frameworks, or decision-support systems
• Familiarity with optimization, simulation, operations research, or industrial workflows
• Experience working in highly technical startup environments such as Palantir, Tesla, Nvidia, Applied Intuition, Retool, or similar organizations

Next steps

1. Apply via this LinkedIn job post
2. We will review and reach out if there is a strong match
3. If aligned, we will introduce you directly to the founding team
4. If this role is not the right fit, we may suggest and make introductions to other high-signal startup opportunities we are actively recruiting for, always with your permission

A quick note on authenticity

This is a real, active role we are supporting in close partnership with the hiring team. We do not post speculative roles and work directly with founders on their actual hiring needs.