Founding Engineer, Platform

A well-funded seed-stage startup building the data and workflow layer for GTM teams is hiring a Founding Platform Engineer to own the backend engine behind every customer workflow.This is a staff-level, highly autonomous founding role working directly with the technical co-founder on production-grade infrastructure at serious volume. You’ll own scheduling, queues, integrations and the scalability, data consistency and availability of the platform. The stack is TypeScript and Effect end to end, with a workflow engine moving toward a custom, agent-native compiler and a custom eval stack running thousands of agent runs. Agent-first product design throughout. No product managers: engineers own features from scoping through to customers.Role: Founding Engineer, PlatformSalary: $200,000 - $300,000 base plus 0.5% - 1% equity (seed-stage strike price)Location: Hybrid, San Francisco Bay AreaWhat you’ll be doing:Own the backend engine behind every customer workflow: scheduling, batching, idempotency, retries and cancellationDesign and ship provider integrations across 40+ data providers, handling rate limits, concurrency, failures and cost per callShape the platform architecture as it evolves toward a custom, agent-native compiler and workflow languageHold the line on uptime, data consistency and cost per run, treating them as product features rather than ops concernsPartner with the technical co-founder on foundational architecture decisionsTake features from scoping through delivery and close the loop once work lands with customersUse coding agents heavily as part of your workflow and own the judgement on what they produceHelp shape engineering culture, hiring and standards as the team scales from ~13 behind youWhat you’ll need:5+ years as a backend or platform engineer, with real production experience at scaleStrong TypeScript, with genuine comfort in functional patterns (Effect, fp-ts or equivalent)Deep experience with Postgres, Redis and the realities of running stateful systems in productionTrack record owning problems end to end, from scoping to shipping to supporting live customersComfort making architectural calls with incomplete information in a startup environmentExperience building systems where reliability, data consistency and cost are first-class concernsFluent with coding agents (Claude, Codex, Cursor and similar) as part of day-to-day engineeringHappy with a hybrid San Francisco Bay Area setup and the pace of a seed-stage teamNice to have:Prior experience as a founding or very early engineer at a fast-growing startupBackground in workflow engines, orchestration systems, data pipelines or multi-tenant SaaS infrastructureExposure to AI/LLM product work, agentic systems or eval infrastructureExperience with ElectricSQL, TanStack or sync-based architecturesPrior work shipping to developer or GTM audiencesThis role would suit a backend engineer who wants real founding-level ownership, hard new problems in agent-native architecture, and the kind of autonomy and upside that only exists at this stage of a company.