Founding Engineer
Summary
Build core infrastructure for a graph-native AI context platform, owning query engines, storage layers, and distributed systems in Rust or Go.
About the Role
A well-funded, early-stage infrastructure company is hiring 2–3 Founding Engineers to work on the core of a graph-native context and memory platform purpose-built for modern AI workloads. This is not a feature factory role — you will own significant pieces of the platform, including the query engine, storage layer, and graph internals, and make architecture decisions that will shape the product for years to come.
You'll work directly alongside the founding team, with your name on design docs and pull requests in the same week. The team is small, high-conviction, and moves fast — every engineer has direct influence on architecture, roadmap, and culture.
The platform addresses a critical gap in AI infrastructure: giving AI agents persistent, structured, and temporally aware context through a GraphDB built on object storage, with semantic search, git-style temporal versioning, and entity resolution. The company has raised a Seed/Series A round from prominent investors and researchers in the AI space.
What You'll Do
Own and ship core infrastructure: query execution, graph storage layer, and distributed systems components
Make architecture decisions with long-term product impact alongside the founding team
Contribute to benchmark and research work that defines the technical category
Participate in architecture reviews and make hard technical trade-offs with real production consequences
Help raise the technical ceiling as the engineering team grows
What We're Looking For
Dealbreakers (must-haves):
Proficiency in Rust or Go with hands-on experience building distributed systems
Experience designing and shipping core infrastructure components — query engine, storage layer, or graph internals — in a production environment
Required:
Strong CS fundamentals — you reason from first principles, not just frameworks
3+ years of relevant engineering experience
Comfort owning large, ambiguous problems without a predefined playbook
Track record of shipping production systems that handle real load for real customers
Ownership mindset: ability to contribute meaningfully to design docs and architectural decisions
Nice to have:
Experience building or scaling distributed systems, databases, or storage infrastructure
Open source contributions in systems-level projects
IIT or Recurse Center background
Prior founding engineer or early-stage infrastructure role experience
Compensation & Benefits
Salary: $160,000 – $270,000 USD annually
Equity: Meaningful equity — the team believes builders should own a real piece of what they create
Wellness programs and free daily meals in-office
Top-tier hardware and software setup
Flexible PTO focused on deep, high-impact work
Learning budget covering books, courses, conferences, and compute for personal experiments
Periodic team offsites
Visa sponsorship: Not available.
Location
This is an on-site role based in San Francisco, CA. The team works together in person, which is core to how they build and collaborate at this stage.