Founding Engineer — Wildcard

Founding Engineer — Wildcard

Location: San Francisco, CA (Onsite)
Compensation: $160,000 – $200,000 base + competitive founding equity
Visa Sponsorship: Not available
Experience Level: 1.5–5 years
Employment Type: Full-Time

About Wildcard

Wildcard is a YC-backed AI commerce startup building the AI SEO platform for retail and ecommerce brands competing in ChatGPT Shopping and emerging AI commerce ecosystems. As AI increasingly replaces traditional search, Wildcard helps brands monitor product visibility across AI engines, optimize product data and onsite content for AI recommendations, and enable instant checkout directly within ChatGPT through OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol.

• 6 live brand customers
• 12 new brand meetings booked weekly
• Founded by a former Scale AI engineering manager who built marketplace and product data systems for Walmart, Coupang, and Shopify
• 2.5 years of runway secured after planned hires

About the Role

This is Wildcard's first engineering hire — a true Founding Engineer role where the selected candidate will help define product direction, technical architecture, engineering culture, and execution strategy from day one. This is not joining an established engineering team. This is helping build the company's engineering function from scratch.

The market is evolving rapidly around agentic commerce, AI shopping, and emerging AI discovery channels. The ideal candidate must be energized by ambiguity, speed, ownership, rapid pivots, and direct product decision-making.

What You'll Own

• Own the full stack across frontend and backend development
• Build AI agents, MCP servers, and emerging AI product surfaces
• Develop incrementality and attribution systems tied directly to ecommerce revenue outcomes
• Scale browser orchestration, retrieval infrastructure, and AI commerce automation systems
• Improve production reliability through queues, retries, observability, and workflow orchestration
• Work directly with customers to convert product needs into shipped features
• Shape engineering standards, architecture, and technical culture from the ground up
• Adapt systems quickly as AI platforms, protocols, and agent ecosystems evolve

Requirements

• Recent experience at a Series A, Series B, or similarly fast-moving high-signal startup
• Clear evidence of startup speed, ownership, and adaptability
• Experience building AI agents or agent-based systems in production
• Strong full-stack engineering capability across TypeScript, Node.js, Express, React, and Next.js
• High agency, resilience, ownership mentality, and comfort wearing multiple hats
• Ability to independently ship across the stack without relying heavily on others
• Willingness to work onsite in San Francisco

Nice to Have

• Top 50 academic background preferred
• Postgres, Redis, async jobs, queues
• Browser automation, scraping, retrieval infrastructure
• Production observability and reliability engineering
• AI agent orchestration, context management, eval systems
• MCP servers, developer tooling, workflow products
• Ecommerce, retail infrastructure, attribution, analytics, search systems
• Codebases designed for agent interoperability
• Background from Profound, Browserbase, Ramp, Hyperbound, Triple Whale, Scale AI, or high-velocity YC/Series A/B startups

This Role Is NOT For

• Big tech-only backgrounds without startup execution proof
• Multiple short tenures without clear shipped outcomes
• Pure backend engineers without product ownership or full-stack independence
• Candidates unable to operate without heavy direction or structure

Logistics

• Role is fully onsite in San Francisco — please only apply if you can commit to this
• No visa sponsorship available

Shortlisted candidates will be contacted by David Joseph & Co., the recruiting partner managing this search on behalf of Wildcard.