Founding Senior Engineer

About the Role

This is an engineer #2 opportunity at an a16z-backed AI startup building an agentic growth platform for consumer brands. You will own the core engineering behind a self-optimizing growth engine, helping shape architecture and culture at a company scaling its brand base rapidly month over month. The role blends deep hands-on technical work with a player-coach responsibility to mentor a founding engineer.

What You'll Do

• Build data infrastructure to track every event across each merchant's lifecycle, surfacing signals that connect actions to outcomes.

• Develop an agentic, self-optimizing growth loop that assesses merchant operations, identifies needed changes, and executes them automatically.

• Own full-stack engineering behind the growth engine end-to-end, with a heavy focus on backend and infrastructure.

• Ship reliable integrations with e-commerce and advertising platforms, plus orchestration tooling to tie them together.

• Mentor the founding engineer while staying hands-on daily, helping establish engineering culture and architectural standards.

What We're Looking For

• 5 or more years of software engineering experience, with strong backend and data infrastructure depth.

• Proven experience building production-grade agentic or LLM-powered systems with end-to-end ownership and third-party API integrations.

• Full-stack capability with a heavy backend emphasis: event systems, data pipelines, and API integrations.

• Experience with commerce or martech APIs such as Shopify, Meta Ads, TikTok Ads, or email service platforms.

• Proficiency in Python and TypeScript.

• Background at a high-growth tech company or well-funded early-stage startup.

• Experience leading or mentoring engineers in a tech lead, player-coach, or founding engineer capacity.

• Strong CS fundamentals, from a rigorous engineering program or equivalent experience.

Compensation & Benefits

Base salary: $175,000 to $225,000 USD annually, plus equity. Visa sponsorship is available.

Location

Hybrid, based in New York, NY.