Founding Full Stack Engineer (Applied AI)

About the company

Our client is an early-stage applied-AI company rebuilding B2B customer operations from the ground up. Rather than augmenting humans with AI, they use long-running AI agents to run the messy middle of the customer lifecycle — onboarding, quarterly business reviews, renewals, and churn — orchestrating digital and human touchpoints so high-touch service works at scale. Most AI investment so far has gone to support chatbots and pre-sales prospecting; this is the part nobody has solved. The founding team has built generative AI and automation platforms at large consumer-internet, coaching, and AI companies, and the CTO is a third-time founder who has scaled engineering orgs past 100 engineers. $4M raised, a team of six, founded in 2025, with real enterprise customers already in production and a launch out of stealth coming shortly.

The role

You'd join as a founding engineer on a small, senior team — a generalist working across the full stack, backend-heavy in Python and FastAPI with React on the front end. You'll sit with enterprise customers to understand their use cases and co-build custom AI agents and workflows for them, then own product and infrastructure areas end to end, architectural decisions included. You'll work directly with the co-founders and have real influence on both the roadmap and the company's strategy. This is a critical hire to service a customer pipeline that's growing faster than the team.

What you'll do

• Build and maintain backend services and APIs in Python and FastAPI, plus front-end experiences in React
• Work directly with enterprise customers to understand their use cases and co-build custom AI agents and workflows
• Own product and infrastructure areas end to end — from problem identification through shipping, including architectural decisions
• Collaborate closely with the co-founders and shape the product roadmap and company strategy
• Operate in a fast-paced, ambiguous environment, taking ownership of outcomes rather than tickets
• Help set the engineering culture and technical bar on a team of six

Nice to have

• Experience at a large, well-known tech company in addition to startup experience
• Applied AI depth — voice agents, memory systems, knowledge graphs, or agentic workflows
• Founding engineer or 0-to-1 startup experience
• Comfort with platform-as-a-service infrastructure

Tech stack

Python with FastAPI and SQLModel on the backend, React on the front end. No specific tech stack is a non-negotiable — adaptability matters more than any one framework.

Before you apply

• This role is remote but California-based. The team optimizes for occasional in-person collaboration in the SF Bay Area, and has repeatedly asked for candidates based in California — Bay Area ideal, LA workable.
• A generalist full-stack profile is the bar. Specialized experience only in ML, data science, or DevOps won't clear it, and heavily UI/UX-focused backgrounds aren't the fit either.
• The interview loop is a 45-minute call with the CTO and co-founder, a 1-hour technical interview on a real-world engineering problem (no leetcode or algorithmic trick questions), then a 45-minute conversation with the CEO.

Compensation & logistics

• $190k–$250k base + competitive equity, up to roughly 1% depending on your cash/equity preference
• Remote within California — occasional in-person collaboration in the SF Bay Area (roughly weekly to monthly, flexible)
• Open to visa transfers (for example OPT or H-1B transfers); no new H-1B sponsorship
• Full-time · hiring 1 for this role · ASAP start, but willing to wait for the right person