Founding Engineer

About the role

This is a founding engineer role for someone who wants to own product, infrastructure, and customer deployment together. You will spend time with customers on factory floors and with procurement and supply chain teams, then turn what you learn into production software. You will work directly with the founders on technical direction, product judgment, and the standards this company will use to build agentic software.

Technical problem

Supply chain software fails when it assumes clean inputs and stable workflows. The real problems are unstructured supplier data, exception-heavy processes, partial automation, and the need to know exactly what the system did, when it did it, and what to do next. The engineering challenge is turning that reality into reliable software: data models that reflect operational truth, workflow state that survives edge cases, and product surfaces that let agents act without creating chaos for the customer.

What you'll own

• Customer deployment and discovery: embed with procurement and supply chain teams, learn how they work, and translate those constraints into product decisions.
• End-to-end workstreams: take a problem from scoping through implementation, rollout, and iteration without handing it off midstream.
• Agentic workflow infrastructure: build the systems that let AI agents monitor supplier data, trigger actions, and handle exceptions reliably.
• Product and data surfaces: design the internal and customer-facing flows that turn messy operational input into something the system can reason over.
• Founding-level technical judgment: help choose architecture, define engineering standards, and set the baseline for quality and reliability.
• Deployment feedback loops: turn what breaks in real customer environments into durable fixes, not one-off patches.
• Founder collaboration: work directly with the founders on what to build next and how the product should evolve.

Who this is for

• You are likely a strong fit if you have:
• 2+ years of experience as a full-stack or backend-leaning engineer, with enough scope already to own production systems end to end.
• Shipped software in environments where correctness, reliability, and maintainability mattered.
• Worked through ambiguity without waiting for perfect specs.
• Comfort talking to operators, not just engineers, and translating those conversations into software.
• Strong product judgment: you can tell the difference between a demo and a system that will work in the field.
• Interest in AI agents as operational systems, not just model wrappers.
• Comfort working on-site in San Francisco and traveling to customers when needed.
• The appetite for a small team where your decisions will shape the product and architecture for a long time.

If you are more senior than the title suggests, that can still be a fit.

The company cares more about scope, judgment, and ownership than about a specific career path. This role is not for you if

• You want a narrow feature queue and clearly specified tickets.
• You do not want customer contact or on-site deployment work.
• You prefer to stay in one layer of the stack and avoid product decisions.
• You are not comfortable making calls with incomplete information.
• You think agentic software can stay abstract and never be responsible for real operational outcomes.

Compensation and logistics

• Base salary: $160K–$230K
• Equity: competitive
• Location: San Francisco
• Work model: on-site
• Employment: full-time
• Visa sponsorship: transfers may be considered on a case-by-case basis
• Travel: customer travel is part of the role

About Aurora

Aurora helps exceptional engineers find the right role at some of the most ambitious startups worldwide. We work with teams that value high ownership, technical rigor, and clear scope.