THE OPPORTUNITY We are a seed-stage AI startup, currently in stealth, backed by top-tier VCs. We are hiring for a founding engineer for the role of a Product Architect (Sr PE/PE level). This is a rare kind of role. You will own major parts of the platform from early stages, and play a part in building out the company itself: how we build, how we work together, and what we value as an organization. We are building a high-trust, high-standards team of exceptional builders who want to move fast, go deep, own outcomes, invent better ways to create unmistakable customer value and ultimately drive business and personal success. WHAT WE'RE BUILDING Our north star is to help companies of all sizes build, deploy and manage AI applications in a seamless, efficient and cost-effective way. We believe that more and more enterprises and AI startups will build their own application-specific AI models in order to own major portions of their application stack, build on their IP position and optimize for performance and costs. For these companies, models, weights, and data are becoming the strategic moat. But moving from experimentation to production remains slow and messy: fragmented tooling, mounting infrastructure complexity, and significant engineering time lost to security, access, and compliance work instead of innovation. Our core value proposition is simple. We help product and engineering teams move faster with building and integrating AI models into their applications, with high confidence and trust. The platform is designed to be deployed in a customer’s existing environments, ranging from public clouds, on-prem, and hybrid environments. We will share the full picture, including our product, early traction, and roadmap, in our first conversation. WHY THIS ROLE IS DIFFERENT You are building the thing, not inheriting it. As a founding engineer, you will make the architectural decisions everything else gets built on: the core platform, the technology stack, and the engineering culture. There is no legacy codebase and no committee. The equity is real. The pace of progress in AI has created a once-in-a-lifetime window, and where you spend the next few years matters more than it ever has. You can spend them at a big tech where you are a line item in a headcount plan, doing your best work under the constant pressure of the next layoff cycle while someone else captures the upside. Or you can spend them as a founding engineer with meaningful equity in what you build. You will work directly with a founder who has done this at scale. Our CEO has nearly two decades of experience building and scaling AI infrastructure businesses. He scaled a business from about $100M into a multi-billion-dollar segment at a leading cloud provider, and served as Chief Product Officer of a company he helped take public, now valued at over $50B. He leads by example, stays hands-on, and invests heavily in developing people and helping them do the best work of their careers. The timing is now. Enterprise AI is crossing from experimentation into production right now, and the infrastructure layer underneath it is being decided. The companies that define that layer will be built in the next few years, by small teams that move fast. WHAT YOU'LL DO This is a hands-on building role. You will report to the CEO and collaborate closely with our founding Product Architect on the product platform. We expect roughly 80% of your time on product development, with the rest split between product research and direct customer support. - Design, build, test, and operate production-grade features and services. - Build and run systems that deploy across public cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments. - Contribute to architecture and technical decisions, partnering with the Product Architects on the bets that shape the platform. - Take part in product research: prototyping new approaches and evaluating emerging tools and techniques. - Work directly with early customers to turn real-world requirements into working capabilities and to support them in production. - Use AI-driven development workflows (Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent) as a daily multiplier on velocity and quality. - Help set the bar for engineering quality and craft as the team grows. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR We are hiring across Senior (L5 equivalent) and Staff (L6 equivalent) levels. The work is the same. The difference is depth of experience and the scope of the systems you have built and owned. - 5+ years of hands-on engineering experience building and shipping production software, with a track record of maintaining it in production. - Experience building distributed systems, backend services, or infrastructure platforms with an eye for reliability and performance. - Working knowledge of cloud-native technologies: Kubernetes, containerized workloads, service-oriented architectures, and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, or similar) across AWS, Azure, or GCP. - Strong systems fundamentals: API design, backend architecture, performance, and reliability. - Strong programming proficiency in Rust or C++, with experience writing performant production grade code. - High ownership and bias for action in 0-to-1 environments. You are comfortable making pragmatic trade-offs, operating with incomplete information, and driving work from idea through launch. - Excellent communication. You can work directly with customers, discuss trade-offs on the merits, and collaborate closely with a small team. STRONG PLUSES - Experience building customer-facing, large-scale distributed systems and applications: production software that real users and enterprises depend on. - Experience building and deploying solutions across multi-cloud and on-prem environments. - Experience with AI/ML infrastructure, including training, inference, or the platforms and pipelines around them. - Familiarity with security domains such as identity, access control, key