Senior Founding Engineer, Distributed Systems

Senior Founding Engineer, Distributed Systems | Kleiner Perkins-backed startup building an AI that buys and sells inventory | San Francisco (on-site, 5 days) | $200K–$300K 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 seat is for a senior engineer who wants to design the core systems of a company from a blank page. Agents here don’t just answer questions. They place orders, negotiate prices and move real money and inventory, so the platform underneath them has to be correct, durable and observable at scale. You’ll design it, build it and own it.

The Role

Architect and build the durable-execution platform that runs fleets of agents: long-running workflows, retries, idempotency, state, failure recovery and observability across distributed services.

Design the data and service foundations for entity resolution over millions of messy SKUs, product substitution and search, pricing discovery and the full purchase-order lifecycle.

Make the foundational technical decisions, from storage and OLAP to service boundaries, and write a lot of the code yourself.

Set engineering standards and mentor the early team as it grows.

Speak with buyers and suppliers when it matters, so the systems you build fit how the industry really works.

About You

You’ve originally designed and owned complex distributed systems in production, as the architect from the start, not by extending or optimising someone else’s design.

Roughly 5–15 years of engineering experience, with strong CS fundamentals and a record of shipping systems that matter.

A generalist backend and systems engineer. Experience mainly in forward deployed, solutions, data-pipeline or product management roles is unlikely to fit this seat.

Comfortable in Python, TypeScript or Node. Experience with durable execution or workflow engines (such as Temporal), event-driven systems or large-scale data is a strong plus.

You want to build from zero at a seed-stage company, with the pace, ownership and on-call that come with it.

Personable enough to hop on a call with a customer.

Bonus: time at a strong engineering company or a top AI lab (think Stripe, Databricks, Temporal, Confluent, OpenAI, Anthropic), or a previous founding role.

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 system design, a product case study and a deep dive into a system you’ve designed. They move fast, sometimes to an offer within hours.

If you want to architect the platform behind an AI-native distributor going after an enormous market, apply now or send your CV to will@inventurerecruitment.com.