Founding Engineer — Applied AI & Developer Tooling

Location: San Francisco, CA

Compensation: $250,000–$400,000/year

Equity: 0.25%–2%

Relocation and visa support: Available for eligible candidates

Company Overview

We’re partnering with an early-stage company building an AI-powered observability platform that helps engineering teams understand and improve their production systems through natural language.

The platform reduces OpenTelemetry instrumentation from days of manual work to minutes. Once applications are connected, engineers can use prompts to build custom debugging agents, evaluation tools, autonomous alerting, and observability applications grounded in real production data.

The company has raised $10M from investors including Khosla Ventures, Max Levchin, The House Fund, and South Park Commons. Teams at GPTZero, Perplexity, Orb, and Together AI have experienced the platform.

The Role

As a Founding Engineer, you’ll work across applied AI, full-stack development, infrastructure, and production support. You’ll help shape the product and its technical foundations, taking ownership from identifying problems through implementation and production operation.

This role is suited to a hands-on engineer who enjoys ambiguity, prototypes frequently, and connects technical decisions to business and customer needs.

What You’ll Do

• Build AI agents that solve complex, unstructured engineering problems.
• Apply AI extensively to developer tooling and workflows.
• Reduce instrumentation onboarding from days of hands-on work to minutes.
• Scale the telemetry engine to handle petabytes of data.
• Reduce data-processing latency from minutes to seconds.
• Own projects across application development, infrastructure, and production support.
• Identify technical risks, evaluate solutions, and manage delivery.
• Communicate complex technical ideas clearly across the team.

Must Have

• 3+ years of software engineering experience.
• 1+ year of experience building AI agents for complex tasks.
• Extensive experience applying AI to developer tooling.
• Engineering experience spanning multiple areas, including full-stack development, infrastructure, and production support.
• Demonstrable technical strengths through shipped products, challenging projects, or other concrete accomplishments.

Nice to Have

• Experience instrumenting applications with OpenTelemetry or comparable observability tools.
• Experience scaling telemetry systems or working with high-volume production data.
• Experience improving latency and reliability in production systems.

Soft Skills

• Ownership: Take initiative and follow through from identifying problems to delivering solutions.
• Curiosity: Explore new ideas, experiment, and learn quickly.
• Problem-solving: Navigate ambiguity and turn complex challenges into practical solutions.
• Communication: Explain complex ideas clearly and collaborate effectively.
• Product mindset: Connect technical decisions to customer needs and business goals.
• Planning: Set realistic estimates, prioritize effectively, and manage delivery.
• Adaptability and resilience: Work across different areas and persist through challenges.

Compensation & Relocation

• Base salary: $250,000–$400,000 annually.
• Equity: 0.25%–2%.
• Relocation assistance: Flights, 2–3 weeks of temporary housing near the office, and $10,000 for miscellaneous relocation expenses.

Relocation assistance includes a 24-month repayment agreement: full repayment during months 0–12 and prorated repayment during months 12–24. Repayment also applies if employment is terminated for cause.

Visa Support

Supported pathways include:

• H-1B transfers.
• TN visas for Canadian and Mexican candidates.
• OPT to H-1B for candidates already in the United States, with annual lottery submissions when eligible.
• H-1B1 for Singaporean candidates.
• E-3 for Australian candidates.

Hiring Process

1. Introductory call: 20 minutes, potentially extended to 30 minutes.
2. Technical interview 1: 45 minutes.
3. Technical interview 2: 45 minutes.
4. On-site interviews: 9 a.m.–3 p.m., typically Tuesday or Thursday. Flights and hotel accommodation are provided when needed.
5. Offer decision: Typically within 24 hours of the on-site interview.