Founding Engineer
$160,000–$270,000 year
On-siteSan Francisco, California, United States
Job Summary
Own and ship core infrastructure including query execution, graph storage layers, and distributed systems components. Make architecture decisions with long-term product impact alongside the founding team, contributing directly to design docs and pull requests. Participate in architecture reviews to make hard technical trade-offs with real production consequences while helping raise the technical ceiling as the team grows. This early-stage infrastructure company builds a graph-native context and memory platform for modern AI workloads, addressing persistent, structured, and temporally aware context for AI agents. The role requires proficiency in Rust or Go and 3+ years of experience shipping production systems that handle real load.
Required Qualifications
- 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
- This is an on-site role based in San Francisco, CA
- The team works together in person
Desired Qualifications
- 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
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