What are the responsibilities and job description for the Founding Member of Technical Staff position at TierZero AI?
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AI has changed how (and how fast) engineering teams build and ship code. But productionizing code still runs at human speed, and that gap is becoming every engineering team's biggest bottleneck. TierZero is how fast-moving engineering teams manage code in production: faster incident response, full operational visibility, and distributed knowledge across every engineer on the team.
We've raised $7M from top investors like Accel and SV Angel, and are trusted by companies like Discord, Drata, and Framer to run their high-scale systems and build the infrastructure layer for their AI-era engineering teams.
The Role
As a founding team member, you’ll help invent and build the core product and systems from the ground up. You’ll work directly with the CEO, CTO, and most importantly, our customers. Things change regularly, and here are examples of the types of work you’ll be working on:
- Want to learn from a team of seasoned engineers who have directly shipped $10B of value
- Want to be in-person 3 days a week in our San Francisco office
- Thrive in ambiguity
- Are product-minded and customer-first thinking
- Are interested in working with LLMs, MCPs, Cloud Infrastructures, and Observability tools
- Have 5 years of working experience or open-source experience
- Bonus: Worked at a startup before and know what to expect
AI has changed how (and how fast) engineering teams build and ship code. But productionizing code still runs at human speed, and that gap is becoming every engineering team's biggest bottleneck. TierZero is how fast-moving engineering teams manage code in production: faster incident response, full operational visibility, and distributed knowledge across every engineer on the team.
We've raised $7M from top investors like Accel and SV Angel, and are trusted by companies like Discord, Drata, and Framer to run their high-scale systems and build the infrastructure layer for their AI-era engineering teams.
The Role
As a founding team member, you’ll help invent and build the core product and systems from the ground up. You’ll work directly with the CEO, CTO, and most importantly, our customers. Things change regularly, and here are examples of the types of work you’ll be working on:
- Design and implement agentic AI systems that reason about large sets of unstructured data
- Ship full-stack features with direct user feedback
- Contribute to the product experience so agents aren’t just smart, but usable and trusted by engineers
- Build systems to automatically evaluate LLM outputs and improve agentic reasoning through self-play and feedback loops
- Construct ML pipelines, including data ingestion, feature generation, embedding stores, RAG pipelines, vector search infra, and graph databases
- Explore and prototype with open-source and frontier LLMs to evaluate tradeoffs
- Build scalable infra to support long-running multi-step agents, including memory, state management, and async workflows
- Participate in everything from company strategy to customer calls to office snacks
- You want to work with an experienced team. CEO is 2x founder and infra leader with a previous successful exit; CTO spent a decade at Databricks, leading AI engineering; Team members are all staff-level engineers from Databricks, Brex, Linkedin, Niantic, Nextdoor and 11x.
- You believe that everything is “figureoutable”. You iterate, try things, learn, and keep pushing. You want to learn and grow fast, and build something meaningful along the way.
- You’re excited to work at the frontier. Our tech stack is pushing the envelope on technology, touching Gen AI infra, LLMs, observability, distributed systems, and real-time data pipelines regularly. We blend hardcore engineering with applied research to solve real, unsolved problems.
- You want to shape the company from day one. You’ll influence product direction, culture, architecture, and how we scale.
- You believe that the engineers of tomorrow are 100x more productive than even the best engineers of today, and want to accelerate towards that future.
- Medical, Dental, Vision insurance
- 401(k)
- Lunch & Dinner in the office
- Snacks and drinks
- M5 macbook iPad Air
- Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, and unlimited budget to test out new software and models
- Give Trust and Opinions: We trust people to execute independently and speak candidly. No micromanagement, no politics. Challenge ideas directly and assume positive intent.
- Be the Customer: We are our own customers. We build customer empathy by deeply understanding real problems and delivering more value than we charge for.
- Love the Journey: Startups are hard. We care about the craft, enjoy building together, and operate at a sustainable pace.
- Build Intentionally: Move fast, but with purpose. Anti-996. Debate decisions, avoid thrash, and focus on what truly matters. Depth over breadth.
- Everything Is Figureoutable: Hard problems are expected. With creativity and persistence, we will find a way forward.