Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer | Kleiner Perkins-backed startup building an AI that buys and sells inventory | San Francisco (Onsite) | $150K–$300K base We've partnered with an AI-native startup rebuilding how one of the world's largest and least-digitised industries actually 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 today. They have just closed a $20M inception round from Kleiner Perkins, one of the most iconic venture firms in the world. 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 this is the far more ambitious next step. The market is enormous; those customers alone were buying tens of billions a year, and that's a fraction of one percent of the whole, so the ceiling here is genuinely vast. This is a true founding engineering seat. You'll own massive, ambiguous problem domains end to end, from architecture through to customer conversations, and help shape the technical direction and culture from day one. The problems are genuinely hard and most have never been built for this industry: entity resolution over millions of messy SKUs, agentic search that understands what substitutes for what, pricing discovery, and a durable-execution agent platform running distributed systems that transact for real. You'll report to the Head of Engineering and build alongside people who have shipped systems like these before. The Role As a Founding Engineer, you will: Own entire problem domains end to end, such as the purchase-order lifecycle, entity resolution or agentic search, architecting, building and iterating with zero hand-holding.Build core AI infrastructure: entity matching and resolution, product substitution via RAG, pricing discovery, and a durable-execution agent platform running distributed systems at scale.Get on the phone with customers directly to learn their operations and turn messy real-world problems into shipped solutions.Work with large-scale, real-world supply-chain data to automate workflows that still run on email, PDFs and tribal knowledge.Set the engineering bar and culture as one of the first engineers on the team. About You You're a technically excellent engineer with strong CS fundamentals and a track record of shipping high-impact work. The experience range is wide, from early-career builders with exceptional fundamentals through to seasoned systems architects.You have a high slope: clear evidence of fast, continuous growth, often rapid progression at a strong company before taking on founding-level ownership.You're autonomous and hungry, running at hard, ambiguous problems without needing direction and shipping relentlessly.You're comfortable in Node, Python or TypeScript, and drawn to hard systems problems such as distributed systems, durable execution and large datasets.You're personable enough to be customer-facing: a common-sense problem solver who can hop on a call with a buyer or supplier.There's something remarkable about you, a standout achievement in school or work that signals you're in the top tier.Nice to have: time at a strong engineering brand or a top AI company, or prior founding-engineer, member-of-technical-staff or forward-deployed experience.You're able to work on site in San Francisco five days a week. The company supports relocation and is open to visa transfers and new sponsorship, including H-1B and TN. The role pays a $150K–$300K base plus founding-level equity, and the team moves exceptionally fast, sometimes to an offer within hours. If you want to be a core builder of an AI-native distributor taking on a trillion-dollar industry, apply now or send your CV directly to will@inventurerecruitment.com.