Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer | Kleiner Perkins-backed startup building an AI that buys and sells inventory | San Francisco (on-site, 5 days) | $150K–$250K base + founding equity

We’ve partnered with an AI-native startup rebuilding how one of the world’s largest and least-digitised industries runs: wholesale distribution. They’re building an AI-powered distributor that uses LLMs to buy and sell inventory for real, replacing the email, PDFs and tribal knowledge the industry still runs on. They’ve just closed a $20M inception round led by Kleiner Perkins. The founder has done this before: his previous supply-chain software company grew to 320+ customers transacting around $2 billion a month in inventory, and those customers alone were less than one percent of the market. This is the far more ambitious next step.

This is a true founding seat on a small, in-person team, for engineers who are growing fast and want far more ownership than a big company can give them. You’ll own a whole problem domain from day one, build it, ship it and talk to the customers using it, alongside engineers who have built systems like these before.

The Role

Own an entire problem domain, such as the purchase-order lifecycle, entity resolution over millions of messy SKUs, or agentic search that understands what substitutes for what.

Write a lot of code across backend, systems and product. This is a hands-on engineering role, not a forward deployed or solutions position.

Build on a durable-execution platform running fleets of agents that transact for real, using Python, TypeScript, Postgres and LLMs.

Speak directly with buyers and suppliers, and turn what you learn into shipped product.

Help set the engineering bar and culture as one of the first engineers.

About You

You’ve shown clear, fast growth in one of two ways:

A strong early run at a respected engineering company, then a move into a founding engineer or founder role at a startup with real traction.

Or you’re 2–3 years into your career from a top CS programme (think MIT, Stanford, CMU, Berkeley, UIUC, Cornell, Waterloo, IIT) and have progressed quickly since.

You’ll also be:

A generalist software engineer with strong CS fundamentals and a track record of shipping. Backgrounds focused mainly on data engineering, ML research or solutions work are less likely to fit.

Autonomous and hungry. You want seed-stage intensity, not post-PMF stability.

Personable enough to hop on a call with a customer.

Remarkable in some way: a standout achievement in school or work that signals you’re in the top tier.

Bonus: time at a hot AI company or fast-moving early-stage startup (think OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Decagon, Sierra, Cognition, Harvey).

Practicalities

On site in San Francisco five days a week. Relocation supported, and the company is open to visa transfers and new sponsorship, including H-1B and TN.

The process is a short chat with the Head of Engineering, a 60-minute live coding round with no AI tools, then a four-hour onsite covering coding, a product case study and a deep dive into a project you’ve owned. They move fast, sometimes to an offer within hours.

If you want to be a core builder of an AI-native distributor going after an enormous market, apply now or send your CV to will@inventurerecruitment.com.