Recruiting from Scratch · 3 months ago
Founding Product Engineer
San Francisco, CA|Onsite
Full-time
Onsite
Senior Level
$200K/yr - $350K/yr
5+ years expRecruiting from Scratch is a talent firm focused on placing top candidates for clients, and they are representing a venture-backed AI startup that is building safety and reliability infrastructure for AI systems. The role involves being the first product engineer, working closely with the founding team to design and build customer-facing features, while also shaping technical choices and building evaluation pipelines.
Staffing Agency
Responsibilities
Serve as the first product engineer, working directly with the founding team to design, build, and ship customer-facing features
Shape core technical choices and set the foundation for long-term scalability
Build evaluation pipelines for detecting AI system failures (e.g., hallucinations, jailbreaks, brand risks, data leakage)
Develop developer tools, monitoring systems, and safety frameworks to help AI builders meet enterprise-grade standards
Partner closely with early customers, shipping product iterations rapidly and incorporating feedback daily
Take ownership across the stack, from frontend (React, TypeScript, Next.js) to backend (Python, LLM pipelines)
Qualification
Required
5+ years of hands-on product engineering experience at a reputable startup
2–3+ years in a high-growth, product-focused startup environment where you shipped quickly and often
Experience working on B2B products with enterprise customers
Strong product sense and user orientation; you work backwards from customer problems
Demonstrated high agency: you prefer action and iteration over perfection
Preferred
Experience with AI/LLM agents, LangChain, or building evaluation pipelines
Prior founding engineer or early-stage startup experience
Background in designing systems for enterprise reliability and security
Exposure to 'forward-deployed' or customer-facing engineering models
Benefits
Equity: 0.5–2.5% meaningful ownership in the company
Full-time, on-site role in San Francisco with relocation assistance available
Visa sponsorship available
Work alongside an elite founding team with backgrounds from leading AI and technology companies
Company
Recruiting from Scratch
A recruiting agency working with technology companies to help them hire software engineers, data roles, product managers, and hardware.
11-50 employees
Funding
Current Stage
Early StageLeadership Team
Will Sanders
Founder / CEO
Tom Callahan
Managing Partner, Retained Executive Search
Recent News
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