Lane — Founding AI & Cloud Engineer

Type: Full-time | On-site | San Francisco, CA (North Beach) Compensation: $150,000–$200,000 + 0–2% equity Hiring count: 1 Visa sponsorship: O-1 available; H-1B transfer + OPT supported Reports to: Jack (co-founder) and the co-founder

About Lane

Lane Technologies, Inc. is building the financial infrastructure for the agentic web — turning intent into action by giving AI agents a dependable way to reach businesses, prove who they are acting on behalf of, and pay for what they transact. Framed as the third iteration of the internet: the first was built for eyes and fingers (documents), the second for apps (walled gardens), and Lane is building the third — a web built for agents. Tagline: "The intelligent infrastructure between prompt and payment." Founded by two ex-Visa operators who worked on agentic payment technology, paired with a founding engineer (ex-Google AI Search); positioned as one of the first teams building end-to-end agentic purchasing, where an AI agent can autonomously buy across surfaces.

Founded: 2025 | Team size: 1–10 (Jack, co-founder, and one founding engineer, ex-Google AI Search) | Stage: Pre-seed Industry: FinTech Website: getonlane.com Office: San Francisco, CA (North Beach)

Why Candidates Should Join

• Founding seat, real latitude: early engineering hire with direct influence over both the product and how the engineering culture is built.
• Genuinely novel space: ex-Visa founders building end-to-end agentic purchasing — a problem framed as unsolved, with an approach nobody else (including Stripe) is taking.
• Full-stack ownership from day one: build across the two core products (Agent Wallet, Agent Checkout), from merchant/developer interfaces down to services, APIs, and data models.

Intake Call Summary

• No intake call transcript is included on the role page (an intake video is present but not transcribed). Request the transcript or intake notes from Contrario if scoring-relevant detail is needed beyond what's captured here.

The Role

Lane is hiring a Founding AI & Cloud Engineer to build the products end-to-end, working across the stack from the interfaces merchants and developers use to the services and data behind them, with particular focus on Agent Wallet (programmable, scope-limited payment credentials tied to a user's existing card) and Agent Checkout (agents completing real transactions across commerce protocols and payment providers), alongside the founding team on the AI and agent features at the center of what Lane does. Because Lane's products move money and assert identity on behalf of real people, correctness and reliability matter throughout the stack, not just at the infrastructure layer.

What You'll Be Doing

• Product development across the stack: design and build features end-to-end, from merchant/developer interfaces through to services, APIs, and data models; move between front end and back end and choose the right place to solve a problem.
• Agent Wallet & Agent Checkout: turn programmable payment credentials and agentic checkout into reliable, well-designed product surfaces.
• APIs & integrations: design and maintain the APIs merchants, developers, and partners build on — keeping the external surface simple while absorbing underlying complexity.
• AI & agent features: build software around LLMs and agents, including the tooling and guardrails that keep them dependable. (Not an ML-research role — comfort building software around AI systems and reasoning about how they behave and where they fail.)
• Reliability & day-to-day operations: share responsibility for testing, monitoring, and operational health; hold a high bar for correctness as the product grows.
• Other responsibilities: early-stage, so responsibilities shift as the business grows.

Tech stack: JavaScript-based, with Python for MCP, all on AWS

Requirements

• 0-3 years engineering
• Agent harness / agent building experience
• High agency, opinionated, generative thinker
• SF North Beach, 5 days in-person + occasional weekends
• Scrappy AI-native generalist (NOT 10-year infra)
• Substantial full-stack experience, front end and back end
• TypeScript, JavaScript, or Python fluency
• API design experience, clarity and stability
• AWS familiarity, willingness to operate what you build
• AI/Cloud experience

Green Flags

• Strong agent harness or agent building portfolio. Direct match for Lane's product.
• Hackathon-heavy background paired with shipping discipline. Demonstrates developer experience and agent integration intuition.
• Scrappy, AI-native generalist with side projects and high agency.
• Fintech adjacency (Stripe, Plaid, Visa, crypto startups, payments tools)
• Comfortable being raw and malleable. Wants to take on more responsibility than they've had at this point in their career.

Red Flags

• 10-year infra engineer wanting Staff or Principal title.
• Pure rule-follower who needs a spec to operate.
• Big-team-only background with no scrappy chapter. Case-by-case but generally not a fit.
• Cannot work SF in-person 5 days a week + occasional weekends
• superficial understanding of agentic engineering. NEEDS to be deeply embedded in agentic engineering

Role Details

• Salary — $150,000–$200,000
• Equity — 0%–2%
• On-site policy — SF in-person (North Beach), 5 days/week + occasional weekends, startup hours
• Visa sponsorship — O-1 available; H-1B transfer + OPT supported
• Employment type — Full-time
• Location — San Francisco, CA

Benefits & perks: Meaningful equity · Meals at the office (no rules within reason) · Health insurance (dental, vision, medical) · H-1B transfer + OPT support

Screening Questions

• None provided on the role page. Add here if Contrario supplies role-specific screening questions.

Interview Process

Stage 1 — Pending Approval — Candidates awaiting initial approval. Stage 2 — Intro Chat with Jack — Founder intro conversation. Stage 3 — Technical Discussion with Founding Engineer — Technical deep-dive with the existing founding engineer. NOTE: this is the kill point — the "deeply embedded in agentic engineering" bar is tested here (where Samay Sahoo was rejected as "not technical enough"). Stage 4 — Chat with Co-Founder — Conversation with the co-founder. Stage 5 — Superday In-Person — Whiteboarding session at the SF office. Stage 6 — Offer Extended — Offer has been extended. Stage 7 — Candidate Hired — Candidate accepts and starts.

Ideal Companies & Backgrounds

• None listed on the role page.

Ideal Candidate Profiles — DO NOT CONTACT

For reference only — do not source these profiles. Maps to the role page's "Ideal Candidates — DO NOT CONTACT" list.

• Aiden Cohen — LinkedIn linked on page (URL not captured in pasted HTML; re-copy expanded if needed).

Rejected Candidate Feedback

Live client/Contrario feedback to date. These refine the effective bar BEYOND the written Requirements — screen against them before submitting.

1. Builder over DS/ML — Gilbert Harijanto rejected by client 07/07/26: "need builders, data science skillset relevant later." Prioritize demonstrated product-builder/shipping signal over ML/research/data-science depth.
2. Predominantly ultra-scrappy startup pedigree — Ashish Ramrakhiani rejected by Contrario 07/08/26: "Lane wants more ultra-scrappy startup experiences." Scrappy must be the whole story, not just present — higher bar than the written "no scrappy chapter" Red Flag.
3. High-pedigree startup background — Maung Htike rejected by Contrario 07/10/26: "lacks high-pedigree startup background; stealth-startup traction unclear; is a contractor." Scrappy alone isn't enough — Lane wants scrappy at recognizable/funded/traction-y startups; wary of fixed-term contractors over committed FTEs.
4. Deep, live technical agentic bar — Samay Sahoo rejected by client 07/10/26 (post Stage-2/Jack intro): "super nice but really just not technical enough." Agent depth must hold up in the Stage-3 founding-engineer technical discussion. NOW CODIFIED as a written Red Flag ("superficial understanding of agentic engineering. NEEDS to be deeply embedded in agentic engineering") — the Contrario bot screens against it too.

Net effective bar: deep, demonstrable agentic engineer + genuinely/predominantly scrappy + high-pedigree (recognizable/funded) startup background + substantial full-stack & API depth. Screen on agent DEPTH and pedigree FIRST.