Founding Engineer

About the role

This is a core infrastructure role at a seed-stage graph database company building the memory and context layer for AI agents. You'll join a small, high-conviction engineering team owning the hardest parts of the stack—query execution, graph storage internals, and distributed systems—and make architecture decisions that shape the product for the next decade. It's a direct-impact position: your name will be on the design docs and the pull requests in the same week.

Responsibilities

• Own and ship core infrastructure components including the query engine, graph storage layer, and distributed systems.
• Drive architecture decisions with long-term product impact alongside the founding team.
• Contribute to benchmark and research work that defines the technical category.
• Participate in architecture reviews and make hard technical trade-offs with real production consequences.
• Help raise the technical ceiling and shape engineering culture as the team scales.

Requirements

• 3+ years of relevant engineering experience with strong CS fundamentals—the kind built on first principles, not just frameworks.
• Proficiency in Rust or Go, or a demonstrated drive to go deep in systems-level languages.
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• Hands-on experience designing and shipping distributed systems, databases, or storage infrastructure in production environments.
• Proven ability to own large, ambiguous problems without a defined playbook.
• Track record of shipping production systems that real customers depend on under load.
• Open source contributions in systems-level projects are a strong plus.
• Prior founding engineer or early-stage infrastructure experience is a plus.

Benefits

• Salary range: $160,000 - $270,000 USD annually, plus meaningful equity.
• Learning budget.
• Flexible PTO.
• Wellness programs.
• Gear/software stipend.

Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, CA, United States.