Founding Software Engineer

Founding Software Engineer (AI Systems)

Location : Palo Alto, CA (Daily on-site for core collaboration hours)

Compensation : Competitive salary plus meaningful equity

Rec Gen is working with a Tier-1, VC-backed Silicon Valley startup hiring one of their first Founding Engineers to own core production systems from day one. This is a true 0→1 build where you will work directly with the founders on foundational AI and backend infrastructure.

This role is for engineers who want real system ownership, not feature tickets.

What You Will Own

Design and ship production backend services and APIs from prototype to scale

Build and productionise LLM-driven systems including RAG, retrieval, evaluation loops, and memory

Own reliability in production including monitoring, debugging, and incident response

Make architecture decisions around data stores, schema evolution, and security

Tune latency, cost, and model performance in real-world workloads

Collaborate closely with product and design to ship user-facing systems end to end

What They Are Looking For

Experience shipping production backend or platform systems

Comfort working directly with LLMs, embeddings, and retrieval pipelines

Strong systems thinking around performance, reliability, and scalability

Experience with modern cloud infrastructure and deployment

Previous startup or early-stage experience strongly preferred

Nice to Have

Vector databases such as PGVector, FAISS, Milvus

GPU inference, model optimisation, or retrieval tuning

TypeScript or frontend system experience

Open-source contributions or prior founding-team exposure

Working Model

The engineering team works from Palo Alto daily for a few core collaboration hours with flexibility outside of that window. This is not a remote role.

Why This Role Is Different

You will own real production systems

You will have direct influence on technical direction

You will build alongside founders who have successfully scaled companies before

You will take a product from zero to real users and real scale

To Apply

Please apply directly via LinkedIn with your resume. Shortlisted candidates will receive the full technical brief.