Founding Engineer

About the Role

This is a core infrastructure role at a seed-stage graph database company building the memory and context layer for AI agents. You'll join a small, high-conviction engineering team owning the hardest parts of the stack — query execution, graph storage internals, and distributed systems — and make architecture decisions that shape the product for the next decade. It's a direct-impact position: your name will be on the design docs and the pull requests in the same week.

What You'll Do

• Own and ship core infrastructure components including the query engine, graph storage layer, and distributed systems.

• Drive architecture decisions with long-term product impact alongside the founding team.

• Contribute to benchmark and research work that defines the technical category.

• Participate in architecture reviews and make hard technical trade-offs with real production consequences.

• Help raise the technical ceiling and shape engineering culture as the team scales.

What We're Looking For

• 3+ years of relevant engineering experience with strong CS fundamentals — the kind built on first principles, not just frameworks.

• Proficiency in Rust or Go, or a demonstrated drive to go deep in systems-level languages.

• Hands-on experience designing and shipping distributed systems, databases, or storage infrastructure in production environments.

• Proven ability to own large, ambiguous problems without a defined playbook.

• Track record of shipping production systems that real customers depend on under load.

• Open source contributions in systems-level projects are a strong plus.

• Prior founding engineer or early-stage infrastructure experience is a plus.

Compensation & Benefits

Salary range: $160,000 – $270,000 USD annually, plus meaningful equity. Additional benefits include a learning budget, flexible PTO, wellness programs, and a gear/software stipend. Visa sponsorship is not available.

Location

On-site in San Francisco, CA, United States.