Founding Engineer

About the role

We're a Y Combinator-backed GovTech AI startup building AI-powered voice agents for local government departments — helping civil servants automate routine constituent inquiries, improve service responsiveness, and free up staff to focus on higher-value work. Our product handles calls 24/7 across dozens of languages and integrates with existing government technology stacks.

We're hiring a Founding Engineer to join our small, early team and help shape the technical foundation of the product. This is a high-ownership, high-impact role where you'll work directly with the founding team — making architecture decisions, shipping production features end-to-end, and helping define how we build as the company scales.

Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement core product features across the full stack — frontend, backend, and infrastructure.
• Own architecture and infrastructure decisions to support scalable, reliable production systems.
• Ship production-quality code quickly and iterate based on real user and customer feedback.
• Build and maintain APIs, services, and data models that power the product.
• Establish DevOps practices including CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, observability, and reliability standards.
• Collaborate closely with founders and cross-functional partners on product direction and priorities.
• Participate in customer conversations to translate needs into technical solutions.
• Help mentor and recruit early engineering hires as the team grows.

Requirements

Must-haves:

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience building and shipping production web applications.
• Proven experience shipping end-to-end features at an early-stage or small startup.
• Experience deploying and maintaining cloud-based services with CI/CD pipelines.
• Proficiency in at least one core backend language (e.g., Node.js, Python, or Go).
• Experience designing and consuming RESTful APIs with proper versioning and security considerations.
• Experience building MVPs and iterating quickly based on user feedback.
• Experience designing and working with relational and/or NoSQL databases, including data modeling.
• Full-stack development experience — backend APIs and frontend UI.
• Strong fundamentals in software design, algorithms, and system architecture.
• Excellent communication skills and a collaborative, product-minded approach.

Nice-to-haves:

• Frontend development experience with modern frameworks such as React or Vue, including responsive UI design.
• Experience with containerization and cloud-native architectures (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience with observability, monitoring, and error reporting tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Sentry).
• Background working on software for government, public sector, or similarly regulated domains.

Location

This is an on-site role based in Los Angeles, CA. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States — visa sponsorship is not available.