Founding Engineer - Agentic

ABOUT THE ROLE This is a founding-level engineering role at a seed-stage flexible workforce marketplace, sitting directly alongside the CTO to own the entire agent layer end-to-end. You will set the patterns for how every agent in the platform gets built, measured, and improved, working on production systems with real-world consequences at scale. This is a rare opportunity to define the architecture of agentic software in a domain where no one has fully solved it yet. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own the full agent layer: context engineering, self-learning systems, evals, the agent harness, and the meta-harness. - Build a compounding knowledge base of undocumented systems so that each new integration gets faster and better than the last. - Design and ship self-healing workflows where agents detect, diagnose, and autonomously recover from production failures. - Build and maintain the meta-harness that lets the team create, evaluate, and evolve new agents in days. - Set engineering patterns that every future agent on the platform follows. - Help hire and grow the agentic engineering team over time. - Work as a peer to the founding team and experiment relentlessly. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - 2 to 9 years of professional software engineering experience, with a hands-on individual contributor focus. - Completed or in-progress engineering, computer science, or quantitative degree from a strong technical university. - Prior experience at an early-stage, venture-backed startup, whether as a founder or an early engineer. A background exclusively in large enterprises or big tech does not fit this role. - Proven experience building agentic software within the past year. This field moves fast and recent hands-on work is essential. - Experience building context or self-learning systems that improve agent performance through accumulated knowledge. - Experience building autonomous failure detection, diagnosis, or self-healing production workflows. - Deep understanding of agent tracing, evals, and eval-driven iteration. - Comfortable building reusable agent harnesses or meta-harnesses for rapidly creating and evolving agents. - Strong implementation focus: you ship working systems in production, not research prototypes. - Proficiency with TypeScript and PostgreSQL; familiarity with LLMs and agent frameworks is expected. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS Salary range: $150,000 to $300,000 USD annually. Visa sponsorship is available where an O-1 visa is a realistic path. LOCATION On-site five days a week in San Francisco, CA. Candidates currently based elsewhere in the US are welcome with a concrete, dated relocation plan to San Francisco.