Founding Engineer - San Francisco, CA - $175K-$250K

Location: San Francisco, CA (in-person)

Compensation: $175,000 - $250,000 per year, plus up to 6% equity

Join an early-stage AI company as its first engineering hire, working directly with the founder on some of the most technically interesting problems in real-time AI interaction.

What You'll Own

- Optimize inference costs across smaller models

- Own and evolve an in-house memory system that powers better agentic interactions

- Ship latency and information-compression improvements across the stack

- Build a content recommendation engine that surfaces interesting content to users

- Design and ship voice interfaces with the latency, presence, and nuance that make them feel real rather than robotic

- Set the bar for code quality and engineering taste, and help recruit the next engineers

What You'll Bring

- 3+ years of professional engineering experience, with at least 1 year in a senior or ownership capacity

- Proficiency in at least one backend language and a strong understanding of distributed systems concepts

- A track record of building full-stack applications and shipping them to production

- Exceptional raw intelligence and the ability to move quickly

- Willingness to work 100% in person in San Francisco, with comfort operating at a pace beyond a standard 9-to-5

Nice to Have

- Former founder or founding engineer experience at a startup

- Frontend proficiency and design taste across the full stack

- Experience optimizing real-time systems, latency-sensitive infrastructure, or voice and video systems

- A genuine passion for AI and what it means for human interaction

This is a true engineer-number-one seat, joining at the moment the product is proving retention and the technical complexity is about to scale significantly, with some of the highest equity available outside of a co-founder role.