Founding Senior Engineer

About the Role

This is an early engineer seat (engineer #2) at an a16z-backed AI startup building an autonomous growth platform for consumer and e-commerce brands. You will own the full-stack engineering behind a self-optimizing growth engine, with a heavy backend and infrastructure focus, and help shape the engineering culture and architecture from the ground up.

What You'll Do

• Design and build data infrastructure to track every event in each merchant's lifecycle, connecting actions to outcomes.

• Develop agentic, self-optimizing growth loops that assess a merchant's operations, identify needed changes, and execute them automatically.

• Own end-to-end engineering of the growth engine, spanning backend services, infrastructure, and frontend surfaces.

• Ship reliable integrations with commerce and marketing platforms including e-commerce, paid social, and email tools.

• Serve as a player-coach: mentor the founding engineer while staying hands-on daily.

What We're Looking For

• 5 to 8 years of software engineering experience, with strong backend and infrastructure depth.

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

• Full-stack capability with a clear emphasis on data infrastructure, event systems, and API integrations.

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

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

• Familiarity with commerce or martech APIs such as Shopify, Meta Ads, TikTok Ads, or email service platforms is a strong plus.

• Experience building products from 0 to 1 in an early-stage environment is a plus.

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

• Proficiency in Python and TypeScript.

Compensation & Benefits

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

Location

Hybrid, based in New York, NY.