Founding Engineer - Full Stack at Recruiting From Scratch
San Francisco, CA
$170,000–$250,000from the description
Aug 18, 2026
San Francisco, CA
Sep 25, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A seed-stage, YC-backed AI startup is hiring a founding engineer to build its core platform end-to-end — spanning agentic AI workflows, LLM-powered brand intelligence tools, and enterprise-facing product features. The role spans backend services, frontend application development, and AI/infrastructure work, with direct collaboration with founders and customers. It suits a generalist full-stack engineer with genuine interest in LLMs and agentic systems who thrives in high-autonomy, early-stage environments.
Mid level · 1+ years · San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 1,650 people in the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 870–2,150
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $190,744 (middle half $167,095–$224,501). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Aug 20, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (8)
The title 'Founding Engineer' carries no standard seniority level; advertised seniority is set to Unspecified accordingly.
The experience range of 1–5 years, combined with end-to-end product ownership and direct founder collaboration, places this at Mid-level — the scope is broad but the experience floor is low and the team is tiny rather than org-wide.
A Bachelor's degree in CS or related field is listed as 'preferred' and equivalent practical experience is explicitly accepted, so no hard degree requirement is set.
AWS is listed as 'cloud infrastructure such as AWS' — a preferred/contextual mention with no firm gate; Terraform and infrastructure-as-code are also explicitly marked preferred.
AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) are listed as preferred, not required; they are grouped as alternatives under one skill.
Data pipelines experience is listed as preferred in the technical requirements.
Equity of 0.3%–1.5% is offered alongside the base salary range but cannot be represented in the compensation fields; noted here for the hiring manager's awareness.
The posting is placed by a recruiting firm (Recruiting from Scratch) on behalf of an unnamed client company.
Read the full posting
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