Staff / Senior Engineer – Founding Engineer (CTO-track)

Varick is the #1 applied AI company on the planet, helping massive enterprise businesses transform from the ground up with AI nativity. Dozens of companies reach out every week, ranging from $1B to $100B in annual revenue, with individual client contracts reaching seven- to eight-figure ARR. Most large companies spend over 50% of their time on manual processes that are too complex for traditional automation and too repetitive for talented employees — Varick builds the AI agents that take over these processes, then stays embedded long-term to monitor, optimize, and continuously upgrade them. The team comes from Meta, AWS Bedrock, Citadel Securities, McKinsey, and Stanford. Backed by Work-Bench and Evan Moore (co-founder of DoorDash). Latest valuation: $30M. 100% production success rate vs. industry average of 5–13%.

About the Role

The Founding Engineer at Varick owns the technical direction of the entire platform. You design the architecture, set the engineering standards, and make the build-vs-buy decisions that determine whether Varick becomes a generational platform or stays a services business. This is not a senior IC seat inside someone else's org — you are the person defining the system. Direct path to CTO.

What You'll Own

• Own the technical architecture: Design and build the core platform — agent orchestration, process mining infrastructure, diagnostic pipelines, and the control plane that turns audit outputs into deployed AI systems
• Build production AI systems at scale: Multi-step agents, retrieval pipelines, evaluation frameworks, human-in-the-loop governance running inside Fortune 5000 environments
• Ship fast, iterate faster: Varick ships to production weekly. Drive engineering velocity, cut scope ruthlessly
• Build the engineering organization: Recruit, mentor, and lead engineers from 5 to 50
• Bridge research and production: Translate frontier work (foundation models, agent frameworks, inference optimization, tool use, long-context reasoning) into production systems

Requirements

Must-Have

• 6+ years of software engineering, with 2+ years as staff, principal, or founding engineer
• Deep production AI/ML systems experience: inference, orchestration, evaluation, and monitoring — not just fine-tuning notebooks
• Built and shipped systems at a top AI lab (Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Meta FAIR) OR as a founding/senior engineer at a high-growth AI startup
• Strong systems design instincts: architects for reliability, scale, and iteration speed simultaneously
• Ownership mentality; high agency — does not wait for requirements documents or permission
• Recruits well: people want to work with you
• Based in SF or willing to relocate; 5 days in-person in FiDi
• No visa sponsorship available

Nice-to-Have

• Agent systems, compound AI workflows, or LLM-powered applications in production
• Background in process mining, workflow automation, or enterprise integration
• Infrastructure depth: Kubernetes, distributed systems, cloud architecture
• Previous founding engineer or CTO experience at a venture-backed startup
• Enterprise environment experience: real security, compliance, and reliability requirements
• Published research or significant open-source contributions in AI/ML

Job Details

• Salary: $225,000 – $300,000
• Equity: Competitive (offers already coming in 3–4×)
• Experience: 6+ years (2+ years staff/principal/founding)
• Visa: None available
• Location: San Francisco FiDi — 5 days in-person
• Headcount: 1

Benefits & Perks

• Founding team scope and ownership of entire technical vision
• Direct path to CTO
• Build platform, not features
• 100% deployment rate with immediate measurable impact
• Direct access to Fortune 5000 decision-makers