Founding / Staff Software Engineer

Founding / Staff Software EngineerUnited States | Up to $400K base + meaningful equityWe’re working with a small group of highly funded, high-growth startups across the US that are hiring exceptional engineers into some of the most important roles in their companies.These aren’t standard “join a large team and own one service” jobs.You’d be joining early, owning major parts of the product or platform, working directly with founders and senior leadership, and helping shape the technical direction of the company.What you could be working onDepending on the company, this could include:building core product from 0 to 1owning backend or distributed systemsbuilding AI products and agentic systemsdesigning data platforms and real-time systemsbuilding infrastructure and developer platformsscaling products used by millions of usersmaking major architectural decisionshelping hire and shape the engineering team around youWhat we’re looking forWe’re looking for engineers who are genuinely exceptional at building software.You’re likely to have:strong hands-on software engineering depthexperience owning complex systems end-to-enda track record of being trusted with increasingly important problemsexperience in a high-growth startup or high-bar engineering environmentstrong product instincts alongside technical abilityexperience building and shipping production systems at scaleevidence of progression, promotions or increasing ownershipthe ability to work directly with founders and operate with very little hand-holdingWe’re open across:Backend EngineeringFull-Stack EngineeringAI / ML EngineeringInfrastructure / Platform EngineeringData EngineeringDistributed SystemsDeveloper ToolsFounding EngineeringStrong backgroundsWe’re particularly interested in engineers from companies such as:OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Perplexity, Cursor, Harvey, Sierra, Glean, Scale AI, Stripe, Ramp, Brex, Plaid, Rippling, Databricks, Snowflake, Figma, Notion, Linear, Coinbase, Chime, Robinhood, Block, Mercury, Vercel, Cloudflare, Datadog, Palantir, Anduril, Uber, Airbnb, Reddit, Dropbox, GitHub, Meta, Google, Apple, Netflixas well as standout engineers from strong venture-backed startups.You do not need to come from one of these companies. We care far more about the level you’ve operated at and what you’ve actually built.CompensationPackages can reach:$400,000 base salary + meaningful equitydepending on experience and company.For the strongest engineers, these are genuinely top-of-market packages.LocationOpen to exceptional candidates across the US, with the strongest demand in:New York, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Boston, Austin and Los AngelesSome roles are fully onsite, some hybrid, and some offer more flexibility depending on the company.Why consider it?These are roles where you can:own something that actually matterswork directly with foundersinfluence architecture and product directionjoin before the engineering team becomes largehave significantly more impact than you would in a mature organisationget compensated at a level that reflects that responsibilityIf you’re already doing well but would move for the right combination of ownership, technical challenge, company quality and upside, this is worth a conversation.Apply even if you’re not actively looking.