Founding AI Systems / Backend Engineer — Agentic Commerce (Stealth, Seed-stage)

Put a Brain Behind Every Pixel

Founding AI Systems / Backend Engineer — Agentic Commerce (Stealth, Seed-stage)

SF · Hybrid (Mon Fri)

A seed-stage, AI-native commerce platform building the intelligence layer behind the world's most exceptional retail, luxury, and lifestyle brands. Think Shopify or Stripe, rebuilt for a world where AI changes how people shop. Contracts upward of $1M each.

~18 months old, $10M raised, ~10 people. Top-of-funnel and product shape both proven. This summer: lock 3–5 marquee customers at $1M , then raise a large Series A in the fall. The execution-phase arbitrage window, you compound the bet, not de-risk it.

WHAT YOU'D OWN

The agent harness is built on ~9-month-old assumptions about AI APIs, tool calling, and context management. It needs a rethink, and you'll drive that direction, not wait for tickets. The bar: an engineer two months in who reads deeply, spots a flawed long-term call, and comes back with a counter-proposal that's right.

STACK

Mostly Elixir, now opening to Python / TypeScript / Rust for the AI-frontier work. Postgres, Elasticsearch, AWS, Terraform.

WHAT THEY'RE LOOKING FOR

- 3–5 years experience (leaning 3); real 0-to-1 as founder, founding engineer, or very early hire

- Built data-intensive apps, search, distributed systems, or real-time data flows in production

- Shipped a production app with LLM retrieval as a core feature

- Strong horsepower clarity of thought; spars toe-to-toe without folding

- Cracked with AI tooling (Claude / Cursor / Codex, daily)

- A visible spike, an obsession, a point of view

- SF-based or relocating; in office Mon Fri; start ASAP

YOU'LL STAND OUT IF

You're a real quant/hedge-fund refugee who can code, an ex-founder (YC, SPC, a16z Speedrun, Neo), or someone with a merit-earned "got out of somewhere" story. Bonus for shipping RAG/agentic features to real users with public writing or OSS to show for it.

COMP & PERKS

Competitive base · 20% bonus · 0.25%–1.0% equity (more for CTO-track) · full health, 401k, HSA/FSA · ~$250/mo wellness learning allowance · new hardware · unlimited vacation · annual retreat. Cash re-based to market at Series A/B.