Founding Engineer

About the role

Pluto is building the headless professional network for the AI era. We started with AI that understands professionals beyond their resumes. Over 30,000 professionals have spoken with it, and agents at 50+ companies, including Mercor, Warp, and David AI, use our data to hire. That business is at a $2.6M annualized revenue run rate. Now we're making that capability available to everyone. Professional networking is still painfully manual: search LinkedIn, sift through profiles, hunt for contact info, send cold messages, and hope someone replies. We've already automated that entire process for companies. Next, we're building a network where anyone can simply tell an agent who they want to meet. It finds the right people, understands why they're relevant, and helps turn those searches into real connections.

The role: You'll work directly with the founders to build agents that search, reason, remember, and take action on behalf of users. The work spans conversational AI, large-scale people search, data infrastructure, and consumer product. It's a true 0-to-1 build without starting from zero. You'll have existing technology, proprietary data, and a proven business underneath you.

Responsibilities

• Own major parts of the product end-to-end, from architecture to polished user experience
• Build agents that understand intent, reason across complex information, and take real-world actions
• Design scalable systems for people search, retrieval, and personalized recommendations
• Work with founders and users to turn ambitious ideas into products people love
• Make foundational technical decisions and set engineering practices as we scale
• Shape the engineering culture and help hire the team

Requirements

• Full-stack: strong TypeScript, React, Next.js, Node.js, and PostgreSQL
• AI engineering: production experience with LLMs, agents, tool calling, or AI workflows
• Technical judgment: you design scalable systems and make pragmatic architecture calls
• Ownership: you've shipped products end-to-end with minimal oversight
• Startup mindset: you move fast, handle ambiguity well, and like working closely with founders

Skills

• TypeScript, React, Next.js, Node.js, PostgreSQL
• LLMs, agents, tool calling, AI workflows
• Scalable system design, people search, retrieval, personalized recommendations
• Voice AI or conversational agents (bonus)
• Search, recommendation systems, or data infrastructure (bonus)
• Early-stage or founding engineer experience (bonus)
• Cloud infrastructure, deployment, and production reliability (bonus)