Founding Engineer, AI Agents (Early-Stage Startup)
ScrumAID
San Francisco, CA · Posted November 1, 2026
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Skills this job asks for
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About the job
A founder-led AI startup in the earliest stage, building a platform where autonomous agents take on real work inside a company’s own systems, is hiring founding engineers. Each hire handles sizeable challenges with minimal supervision and helps decide both architecture and product with the founders.
Your focus
Take charge of the platform’s full-stack work, including the runtime that keeps agents connected to a customer’s email, chat, CRM and other internal tools
Be responsible for agent memory (implicit, explicit and shared skills) and for extended execution, letting agents stay on course across weeks of effort
Design evaluations that reveal when an agent outperforms the human who previously held the task, and let the results shape the roadmap
Create the front end and the layer where people and agents interact, which remains an unsolved design question
Improve proactive suggestions and single-click agent launches, so users discover what agents can accomplish for them
Study leading agent products and apply the lessons to your own design choices
Who thrives here
One to five years of engineering at a strong company, having built agents directly or core pieces around them such as model routing, sandboxes or evals
Comfort across the stack, from the runtime and memory systems to user interfaces
A record of excellence: a strong CS program, a respected employer, peer-reviewed papers or products delivered at scale
Standout achievements in areas like competitive math, programming, chess or entrepreneurship are a bonus
Very AI-forward, high-intensity and open to rethinking how you work
On-site in the San Francisco Bay Area, five days a week. Visa transfers considered.