Founding / Staff Software Engineer

Founding / Staff Software Engineer

United States | Up to $400K base + meaningful equity

We’re working with a small group of highly funded, high-growth startups across the US that are hiring exceptional engineers into some of the most important roles in their companies.

These aren’t standard “join a large team and own one service” jobs.

You’d be joining early, owning major parts of the product or platform, working directly with founders and senior leadership, and helping shape the technical direction of the company.

What you could be working on

Depending on the company, this could include:

• building core product from 0 to 1
• owning backend or distributed systems
• building AI products and agentic systems
• designing data platforms and real-time systems
• building infrastructure and developer platforms
• scaling products used by millions of users
• making major architectural decisions
• helping hire and shape the engineering team around you

What we’re looking for

We’re looking for engineers who are genuinely exceptional at building software.

You’re likely to have:

• strong hands-on software engineering depth
• experience owning complex systems end-to-end
• a track record of being trusted with increasingly important problems
• experience in a high-growth startup or high-bar engineering environment
• strong product instincts alongside technical ability
• experience building and shipping production systems at scale
• evidence of progression, promotions or increasing ownership
• the ability to work directly with founders and operate with very little hand-holding

We’re open across:

• Backend Engineering
• Full-Stack Engineering
• AI / ML Engineering
• Infrastructure / Platform Engineering
• Data Engineering
• Distributed Systems
• Developer Tools
• Founding Engineering

Strong backgrounds

We’re particularly interested in engineers from companies such as:

OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Perplexity, Cursor, Harvey, Sierra, Glean, Scale AI, Stripe, Ramp, Brex, Plaid, Rippling, Databricks, Snowflake, Figma, Notion, Linear, Coinbase, Chime, Robinhood, Block, Mercury, Vercel, Cloudflare, Datadog, Palantir, Anduril, Uber, Airbnb, Reddit, Dropbox, GitHub, Meta, Google, Apple, Netflix

as well as standout engineers from strong venture-backed startups.

You do not need to come from one of these companies. We care far more about the level you’ve operated at and what you’ve actually built.

Compensation

Packages can reach:

$400,000 base salary + meaningful equity

depending on experience and company.

For the strongest engineers, these are genuinely top-of-market packages.

Location

Open to exceptional candidates across the US, with the strongest demand in:

New York, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Boston, Austin and Los Angeles

Some roles are fully onsite, some hybrid, and some offer more flexibility depending on the company.

Why consider it?

These are roles where you can:

• own something that actually matters
• work directly with founders
• influence architecture and product direction
• join before the engineering team becomes large
• have significantly more impact than you would in a mature organisation
• get compensated at a level that reflects that responsibility

If you’re already doing well but would move for the right combination of

ownership, technical challenge, company quality and upside

, this is worth a conversation.

Apply even if you’re not actively looking.