Founding Engineer

📋 Description

• • 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.
• • 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
• • 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
• • 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
• • 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
• • 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
• • 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.