Founding Engineer (Full-Stack)
Location: San Francisco, CA
Company Stage of Funding: Seed Stage AI/Fintech Startup
Office Type: Onsite (4–5 Days Per Week)
Salary: $200,000–$250,000 + Meaningful Founding Equity
Company Description
We're representing an early-stage AI startup building an AI-native platform for the wealth management industry. Their mission is to help financial advisors operate at a dramatically higher level by combining sophisticated financial infrastructure with AI-powered workflows, portfolio intelligence, and automation.
Founded by experienced operators with backgrounds in high-growth technology companies and backed by top-tier investors, the company is building foundational software that helps advisors manage client portfolios, automate complex workflows, and deliver better outcomes at scale. As one of the first engineering hires, you'll play a critical role in shaping the product, architecture, and engineering culture from the ground up.
What You Will Do
- Design, build, and own full-stack product experiences from concept through production deployment.
- Develop backend infrastructure and services that process financial data, power workflows, and maintain platform reliability.
- Build integrations with custodians, financial institutions, data providers, and third-party platforms.
- Create data pipelines that transform complex financial datasets into structured inputs for portfolio analysis and AI reasoning.
- Develop AI-powered workflows, agent systems, and tool-calling infrastructure that automate advisor operations.
- Build intuitive product experiences that simplify complex portfolio management and financial planning workflows.
- Design observability, monitoring, and debugging systems that support rapid iteration and operational excellence.
- Work directly with founders, customers, and stakeholders to understand business needs and translate them into technical solutions.
- Own projects end-to-end while helping define technical standards and long-term architecture.
Ideal Background
- 3+ years of software engineering experience with strong full-stack capabilities.
- Proven experience building and shipping production systems in startup environments or highly technical product organizations.
- Strong proficiency with TypeScript, Node.js, and modern backend development practices.
- Experience designing and building systems from scratch in fast-paced environments.
- Strong product mindset with the ability to translate customer problems into technical solutions.
- Experience working across both frontend and backend systems with a focus on delivering customer value.
- Comfortable operating independently and taking ownership in highly ambiguous environments.
- Experience leveraging AI development tools to improve engineering productivity and velocity.
Preferred
- Experience as a founding engineer, startup founder, or early employee at a venture-backed company.
- Background in fintech, wealth management, financial infrastructure, or other highly regulated industries.
- Experience building AI-powered products, agentic workflows, or machine learning-enabled applications.
- Familiarity with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
- Experience at high-growth product-focused companies such as Stripe, Plaid, Mercury, Robinhood, Figma, Notion, Airtable, Retool, Rippling, or similar environments.
- Experience building customer-facing applications with significant product ownership.
- Strong systems design and architectural decision-making experience.
Compensation and Benefits
- Base salary: $200,000–$250,000.
- Meaningful founding-level equity package.
- Opportunity to join a highly selective founding team building a category-defining fintech and AI platform.
- Direct collaboration with founders and significant influence over product direction and technical architecture.
- Exposure to cutting-edge applications of AI within wealth management and financial services.
- Visa transfer support available for qualified candidates.
- Relocation support available for candidates moving to the San Francisco Bay Area.
- High-autonomy environment with significant ownership and rapid career growth opportunities.
- Collaborative onsite culture focused on building ambitious products and solving complex customer problems.