Founding Engineer

Title: Founding Engineer Duration: Full Time/Direct Hire Location: On-site in San Francisco, CA Comp range: Up to base $300K + Equity Work Authorization: Open to Visa transfer and Sponsorship Interview Process: 3 rounds! Why you should join $20M inception round from Kleiner Perkins. You're joining a company backed by one of the most iconic venture firms in the world — with serious runway to build.Massive market opportunity. Just 320 customers at the founder's prior company were buying $24B/year in inventory — and that's less than 1% of the market. This domain can support a trillion-dollar outcome.Proven founding team. The founder previously built Recurrency (raised ~$40M, 320+ customers). The team has deep domain expertise and a track record of shipping real products to real customers.Founding-level equity and real ownership. You'll shape the technical direction, product, and culture from day one. Comp ranges up to $300K base with founding equity on top.AI-native from the ground up. You're not bolting AI onto legacy software — you're building an AI-native distributor that uses LLMs to buy and sell inventory. The technical problems (entity resolution, agentic search, distributed systems, pricing engines) are genuinely hard and interesting. Hiring manager notes: Must Have: Customer-facing experience Required: 2 - 15 years of experience as a software engineer, founding engineer, or systems architectExperience with complex system design, distributed systems, durable execution, data manipulation, or large datasetsExperience with Node, Python, or TypeScriptCommercial savvy and product sense Nice to Have: Experience As a Founding Engineer, Founding AI Engineer, Member of Technical Staff, or Forward Deployed EngineerExperience at strong engineering brands or top-tier companies (OpenAI, Databricks, OpenEvidence) Red Flag: Jumpy profiles with three consecutive tenures under one yearUnremarkable profiles lacking rapid progression or high career trajectory What we're looking for: We are looking for a Founding Engineer with 2+ years of experience to join Source (backed by a $20M round from Kleiner Perkins) as a core builder of an AI-native supply chain company that uses LLMs to buy and sell inventory. You'll own massive, ambiguous problems end to end — from architecture to customer conversations — and help shape the technical direction and culture from day one. What will you be doing? Own entire problem domains (e.g., purchase order lifecycle, entity resolution, agentic search) as a "GME" — architecting, building, and iterating with zero hand-holdingBuild core AI infrastructure: entity matching/MDP resolution, product substitution via RAG, pricing discovery, and a durable-execution agent platform running distributed systems at scaleGet on the phone with customers directly to understand their operations, gather feedback, and translate messy real-world problems into shipped solutionsWork with large-scale, real-world supply chain data to automate workflows that currently run on email, PDFs, and tribal knowledgeSet the engineering bar and culture as one of the first engineers on the team Key Requirements: Technically excellent — you must be an outstanding engineer with strong CS fundamentals and a track record of shipping high-impact workHigh slope / high trajectory — evidence of continuous, rapid growth (e.g., fast progression at a strong company, then taking on founding-level ownership)Autonomous and hungry — you show up early, stay late, run at hard problems without needing direction, and ship relentlesslyPersonable enough to be customer-facing — common-sense problem solver who can hop on a call with a buyer or supplierSomething remarkable about you — a standout achievement in school or work that signals you're in the top tier Tech stack: Python, TypeScript, Node.js, LLMs, RAG, Distributed Systems