Founding Engineer

Recruiting From Scratch

  • San Francisco, California
  • 30+ days ago
  • Remote

    Highlights

    Who is Recruiting from Scratch : Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers, software, and hardware talent at innovative companies. If you're excited by hard technical problems, direct product ownership, and operating as a true full-stack problem solver, this role offers exceptional upside and impact.

    Numbers & Facts

    LocationSan Francisco, California (
    Remote
    )
    Websiterecruitingfromscratch.com

    Description

     
    Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers, software, and hardware talent at innovative companies. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across the United States to help them hire.

    Title of Role: Founding Engineer

    Location: San Francisco, CA (Presidio – On-site, 5 days/week)
    Company Stage of Funding: Seed (~$10M raised)
    Office Type: On-site
    Salary: $180,000 – $280,000 + Competitive Equity
    Visa: No visa sponsorship available

    Company Description

    Our client is an early-stage enterprise AI startup building intelligent automation systems for the insurance industry.

    The company is transforming one of the largest and most operationally inefficient sectors globally by replacing manual, error-prone insurance workflows with AI-native systems.

    Backed by Y Combinator with one of the largest recent insurtech seed rounds, the company has already secured a pilot with a top-10 U.S. insurance carrier that could convert into a significant seven-figure enterprise contract.

    The founding team brings deep technical and domain expertise, including prior startup exits and experience scaling high-growth engineering organizations.

    With only a few engineers on the team today, this is a rare opportunity to join as an early foundational technical hire and shape both product and engineering culture from day one.

    What You Will Do

    Build AI agents and core product features from scratch
    Own full product modules end-to-end from discovery to production
    Work directly with enterprise customers to deeply understand workflows
    Design and iterate on evaluation systems for AI agent performance
    Build systems that ingest and reason over unstructured enterprise data
    Develop backend systems for scalable AI workflows
    Prototype rapidly and ship production-grade solutions
    Travel occasionally to customer sites for implementation and discovery
    Partner directly with founders on product and technical direction
    Help define engineering culture, architecture, and long-term technical strategy

    Ideal Candidate Background

    2–10 years of full-stack or backend engineering experience
    Strong startup experience or evidence of exceptional ownership
    Experience shipping production systems end-to-end
    Strong product-minded engineering instincts
    Comfortable working in ambiguous, customer-driven environments
    Excited by AI-native engineering workflows

    Preferred

    Built production LLM or AI agent systems
    Experience in regulated or data-intensive industries (insurance, fintech, healthcare, legaltech)
    Strong TypeScript or backend systems experience
    Experience designing eval systems for AI outputs
    Experience with agentic engineering workflows
    Strong customer-facing technical communication
    Exceptional evidence of intensity / excellence (startup founding, competitive athletics, OSS, etc.)

    Compensation and Benefits

    Base salary: $180,000 – $280,000
    Equity: Competitive early-stage equity
    No visa sponsorship
    Relocation support available within the U.S.
    Direct founder collaboration
    Meaningful ownership from day one
    Clear path to future technical leadership

    Why Join

    This is a rare opportunity to join an AI-native startup attacking a massive legacy enterprise market at the exact moment the technology is ready for disruption.

    You’ll work directly with enterprise customers, build production AI systems from scratch, and help define the technical foundation of a company positioned for rapid growth.

    If you're excited by hard technical problems, direct product ownership, and operating as a true full-stack problem solver, this role offers exceptional upside and impact.

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