Founding Engineer - Product Architect

About this role

THE OPPORTUNITY We are a seed-stage AI startup, currently in stealth, backed by top-tier VCs. We are hiring for a founding engineer for the role of a Product Architect (Sr PE/PE level). This is a rare kind of role. You will architect a platform from early stages, and play a part in building out the company itself: how we build, how we work together, and what we value as an organization. We are building a high-trust, high-standards team of exceptional builders who want to move fast, go deep, own outcomes, invent better ways to create unmistakable customer value and ultimately drive business and personal success. WHAT WE'RE BUILDING Our north star is to help companies of all sizes build, deploy and manage AI applications in a seamless, efficient and cost-effective way. We believe that more and more enterprises and AI startups will build their own application-specific AI models in order to own major portions of their application stack, build on their IP position and optimize for performance and costs. For these companies, models, weights, and data are becoming the strategic moat. But moving from experimentation to production remains slow and messy: fragmented tooling, mounting infrastructure complexity, and significant engineering time lost to security, access, and compliance work instead of innovation. Our core value proposition is simple. We help product and engineering teams move faster with building and integrating AI models into their applications, with high confidence and trust. The platform is designed to be deployed in a customer’s existing environments, ranging from public clouds, on-prem, and hybrid environments. We will share the full picture, including our product, early traction, and roadmap, in our first conversation. WHY THIS ROLE IS DIFFERENT You are building the thing, not inheriting it. As a founding engineer, you will make the architectural decisions everything else gets built on: the core platform, the technology stack, and the engineering culture. There is no legacy codebase and no committee. The equity is real. The pace of progress in AI has created a once-in-a-lifetime window, and where you spend the next few years matters more than it ever has. You can spend them at a big tech where you are a line item in a headcount plan, doing your best work under the constant pressure of the next layoff cycle while someone else captures the upside. Or you can spend them as a founding engineer with meaningful equity in what you build. You will work directly with a founder who has done this at scale. Our CEO has nearly two decades of experience building and scaling AI infrastructure businesses. He scaled a business from about $100M into a multi-billion-dollar segment at a leading cloud provider, and served as Chief Product Officer of a company he helped take public, now valued at over $50B. He leads by example, stays hands-on, and invests heavily in developing people and helping them do the best work of their careers. The timing is now. Enterprise AI is crossing from experimentation into production right now, and the infrastructure layer underneath it is being decided. The companies that define that layer will be built in the next few years, by small teams that move fast. WHAT YOU'LL DO This is a hands-on building role. You will report to the CEO and act as the technical lead for the product platform. We expect roughly 60% of your time on product development, with the rest split between product research and direct customer & partner engagement. - Own the end-to-end architecture of a new platform, from core distributed systems to the services and workflows customers touch. - Design, build, and operate production-grade systems that run across public cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments. - Make the foundational technical bets: languages, frameworks, infrastructure, and architecture, and revisit them pragmatically as we learn. - Work directly with early customers to turn real-world requirements into platform capabilities. - Use AI-driven development workflows (Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent) as a daily multiplier on velocity and quality. - Set the bar for engineering excellence, and mentor other engineers as the team grows. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR We are hiring across Principal (L7 equivalent) and Senior Principal (L8 equivalent) levels. The scope is the same. The difference is depth of experience and the size of the architectural bets you have owned. - 12+ years of total builder experience, with hands-on experience building large-scale distributed systems with high availability, and a track record of shipping and operating production software. - Deep expertise in cloud-native platforms: Kubernetes, containerized workloads, service-oriented architectures, and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar) across AWS, Azure, or GCP. - Strong systems fundamentals: API design, backend architecture, performance, and reliability. - Strong programming proficiency in Rust or C++, with experience writing performant production-grade code. - High ownership and bias for action in 0-to-1 environments. You are comfortable making pragmatic trade-offs, operating with incomplete information, and driving projects from idea through launch and adoption. - Excellent communication. You can work directly with customers, debate architecture on the merits, and bring others along. STRONG PLUSES - Experience building customer-facing, large-scale distributed systems and applications: production software that real users and enterprises depend on. - Experience building and deploying solutions across multi-cloud and on-prem environments. - Experience with AI/ML infrastructure, including training, inference, or the platforms and pipelines around them. - Familiarity with security domains such as identity, access control, key management, or trusted computing. - Experience building enterprise software that runs in customer-managed environments. - Prior startup or early-stage experience, or a big-company background and strong conviction that it is time for something different. WHAT WE OFFER - Founding-team equity with meaningful upside. - Competitive cash compensation, calibrated for seed stage. - A direct hand in defining the product, the architecture, and the culture. - Opportunity to be part of a fast-paced environment that values distinctive expertise, emphasizes ownership along with high standards, and fosters open-minded collaboration with exceptional builders. - A founder committed to your growth, and a front-row seat to building a company.