Founding Software Engineer (Customer Experience)

Founding Software Engineer | San Francisco (Onsite) | $160K–$230K base + founding equity

We've partnered with an early-stage, AI-native startup bringing agentic AI to the back office of the trucking and logistics world. Their platform plugs into the dozen-plus systems a carrier already runs, from dispatch and telematics to safety and transport management, and gives operators a single intelligent agent that handles the repetitive communications and knowledge work that used to eat entire teams. It is already live with some of the largest fleet operators in the US, handling the bulk of routine tasks with strong customer satisfaction. It was built by ex-Samsara engineers and former fleet operators, so it knows the industry cold, and it is backed by top-tier investors, with a very high talent bar and a flat, fast-moving culture.

This is a founding engineering seat at an early-stage team, and it is a builder's job. Roughly seventy percent of your week is writing code: the product itself, the integrations underneath it, and the agent layer that has to take real actions inside a carrier's live systems without breaking anything. The other thirty percent is being close enough to the people using it to know what to build next, which early on means hands-on time with their operations teams. As the company grows and a wider team forms around you, this settles into a straightforward senior engineering seat, with the influence that comes from having been one of the first engineers in the door. It carries a significant equity package and a clear path to leadership.

The Role

As a Founding Software Engineer, you will:

• Build and ship product features end to end across TypeScript, React, Node and Python.
• Build the integrations into the systems a carrier actually runs on, including decade-old transport management systems that are barely documented and that nobody wants to touch.
• Work on the agent layer itself: tool use, orchestration, guardrails, autonomy gating and the evaluation harness that tells you whether any of it got better.
• Spend proper time with operations teams who are not remotely technical, work out what they do all day, then go and build it.
• Feed everything you learn from one carrier back into the core product so the next deployment is faster.

About You

• You have 1 to 4 years of full-stack software engineering experience in an individual contributor capacity. This is not a role for new graduates; the team have been clear they cannot support one.
• You have worked at a recognisable startup, early or high-growth preferred, or in Big Tech. Big Tech on its own is not quite enough here, so it helps to pair it with one of the things below.
• A spike that sets you apart: a degree from a top-tier university, founder or founding-engineer experience, time at a very early-stage startup, or a side project people actually use. The hiring manager reads every profile himself and looks for the thing that makes yours different.
• You have shipped customer-facing features into production, the kind external users depend on, rather than internal tooling for your own colleagues.
• You have deployed AI, ML or agentic systems in production. Being AI-native in how you work is a big plus here, particularly if you have managed coding agents or built and measured agent loops rather than only used them.
• You have high agency and thrive in ambiguity. There is no playbook, no onboarding and nobody senior to escalate to. If that sounds like the fun part rather than the scary part, you'll fit.
• One of these fits you: a software engineer who moved into forward deployed or implementation engineering, a software engineer who founded a company or was an early engineer at a startup, a software engineer who moved into product, or someone with a machine learning background who ships.
• You are based in or willing to relocate to San Francisco, comfortable onsite five days a week, and happy with light domestic travel to customer sites. The company is open to visa transfers including OPT and H1B.

The team is moving quickly with this hire and there are only one or two seats. If you want to be a founding engineer building agentic systems that take real actions inside live fleet operations, apply now or send your CV directly to will@inventurerecruitment.com.