[Hiring] Founding Engineer @Recruiting From Scratch

Role Description

We're hiring a founding engineer: a backend or AI engineer, ideally with experience across both. You'll work directly with the founders and alongside our existing team, on the core product, on problems that don't have established answers yet.

This is a senior, hands-on role on a small team with a high bar. You'll have real input on what we build and deep ownership of how it gets built.

We're a seed-stage team moving fast. Expect long hours and real intensity, especially around launches and customer deployments.

This is not a "pick up a ticket" role. You'll decide what the ticket should be.

• Own a meaningful part of the product end-to-end, from design through production
• Build and scale the backend services that power our platform, in Golang and Node.js
• Work across our surfaces: the cross-platform endpoint agent, the policy-enforcement proxy, our backend platform, our security detection pipeline, and our opensource pentesting tools
• Build AI-powered detection capabilities, using LLMs and smaller, task-specific models where appropriate
• Build LLM-powered features and pipelines, then harden them for production at enterprise scale
• Own cloud infrastructure across AWS, Azure, or GCP: deployment, reliability, and cost
• Set the engineering bar: architecture, code review, and the practices future hires will inherit
• Talk to real users and let their feedback drive what you build next
• Help lead the engineers who join after you

Qualifications

• Ideally, you've been a tech lead, even of just 1 to 2 engineers, while staying hands-on
• 2–5 years of backend or AI engineering experience, including shipping and owning production systems at early-stage startups
• Strong in Golang
• Hands-on with cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or GCP): you've deployed, operated, and debugged what you built
• Hands-on experience with LLMs and APIs in production, not just prototypes
• If AI is your core strength: you've built custom models yourself, ideally small, distilled models for classification that run efficiently on CPU
• Can take a rough direction and turn it into shipped product independently
• Fluent with AI coding tools, and understands the code they ship
• Ready to take a leap for a potentially career-changing opportunity

Bonus points

• Experience building and shipping cybersecurity products
• Experience with endpoints (macOS, Windows, Linux) or browser extensions
• Experience with model distillation, quantization, or on-device inference

Compensation

• $150k–$180k base salary
• 1–2% founding equity grant with meaningful upside

Why this role

As our first founding engineer, you'll have more influence over the product and company than anyone we hire after you, with the ownership and equity to match. Your code will run at real enterprises within weeks.