Founding Software Engineer, Platform

Founding Platform Engineer 👨‍💻

AI Agents 🧠

NYC 🗽

Up to $1M TC 💰

Our client is a stealth AI agent startup that has raised over $50M from top-tier investors, including Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins. They are building AI Agents that will revolutionize the Infrastructure/Platform Engineering discipline. As an early team member, the selected candidate will have a direct impact on the technical foundation and culture of the company.

About the Role

We are looking for a Founding Software Engineer to play a critical role in designing and scaling the core infrastructure that powers their AI systems. This individual will work on mission-critical services, collaborate closely with engineering, research, and product teams, and set the technical strategy to ensure performance, scalability, and reliability of their Cloud & AI Infrastructure.

Key Focus Areas

• Distributed Systems: Architect and build highly scalable, available, and performant distributed systems foundational to the AI stack.
• Systems Engineering: Debug system bottlenecks, evolve core infrastructure, and solve novel challenges in performance and scalability.
• Reliability Engineering: Design fault-tolerant systems and lead initiatives around service health, incident response, and resilience.
• Observability: Develop and enhance observability tooling (metrics, logs, tracing) to provide deep visibility into production environments.
• Developer Productivity: Improve developer experience by creating tools, automation, and workflows that accelerate high-quality software delivery.
• Cloud Infrastructure: Architect and maintain cloud-native infrastructure (compute, networking, storage) that supports critical AI workloads.

Responsibilities

• Define and implement scalable, reliable, and secure infrastructure solutions from the ground up.
• Set technical direction, architectural vision, and long-term strategic goals for infrastructure at the company.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, and research teams to ensure infrastructure meets evolving needs.
• Lead and mentor engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence and innovation.
• Enhance automation, internal tooling, and developer workflows to improve engineering efficiency.
• Drive best practices around system reliability, scalability, security, and performance.
• Participate in incident response and postmortems, improving overall system resilience.

Ideal Candidate Qualifications

• Deep expertise in software engineering with proficiency in Python, Go, Rust, or similar languages.
• Experience designing, operating, and scaling distributed systems or developer infrastructure.
• Strong familiarity with Linux environments and tools like Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, and modern observability stacks.
• The ability to navigate and troubleshoot complex systems, diving deep into debugging when necessary.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, particularly in cross-functional environments.

Why Join This Opportunity?

• Be a founding team member at a well-funded, high-growth AI startup.
• Build the next-generation AI infrastructure from the ground up.
• Work on cutting-edge technology with world-class engineers and researchers.
• Competitive salary, equity, and benefits.
• On-site role in NYC, working in an environment that fosters deep collaboration and rapid innovation.

This is an exciting opportunity to help build world-class AI infrastructure and shape the future of AI-powered systems. Interested candidates are encouraged to apply.