Founding Engineer

About Ara

Ara is building the cloud coding agent: an autonomous software engineer that turns a trigger into a pull request and reports back in Slack and Linear. We're a YC company (P26) based in San Francisco, moving fast to redefine how software gets built.

The role

As a Founding Engineer, you'll be one of the first engineers at Ara. You'll own major parts of the product end-to-end, from the cloud IDE and interactive prompting to the autonomous agent that ships code on its own. You'll set the technical direction, ship daily, and directly shape both the product and the culture.

What you'll do

- Build and own core product surfaces across the full stack

- Design the systems that let autonomous agents write, test, and ship real code

- Work directly with the founders and early customers to iterate fast

- Set engineering standards, tooling, and culture as we scale the team

What we're looking for

- Strong engineering fundamentals and a bias toward shipping

- Experience building products end-to-end (frontend, backend, or infra)

- Excitement about AI agents, developer tools, and the future of software

- Comfort with ambiguity and ownership in an early-stage environment

Details

- Location: San Francisco (in office)

- Employment: Full-time

- Compensation: competitive salary plus meaningful founding equity

If you want to build the tool that builds software, we'd love to talk.