Stealth Startup | Founding Engineer | NYC (in-person 5x/week) | Full-Time
The Mission
We’re building a best-in-class multi-modal AI agent product (voice + SMS + email) with the potential to disrupt deeply entrenched software businesses and unify a fragmented industry. We’re a tiny team with real traction pre-product, moving fast, and we care obsessively about craft.
Why this Role
This is a founding engineering seat: you’ll be an early builder shaping the product, architecture, and quality bar from day one. In the first 3–6 months, the role is highly IC-focused. As we scale (including our first in-person hub/site and new hires), this role has optionality (i.e., growing into a leadership role or staying on the IC track and owning the engineering roadmap) for the right person.
What You'll Do
- Build real-time systems for voice (streaming audio, low latency, turn-taking), SMS, and email automation with robust state + memory.
- Design the foundation: architecture, data model, reliability, observability, deployment, and developer velocity.
- Set the quality bar: clean code, pragmatic abstractions, testing strategy, “don’t break prod,” and thoughtful product UX.
- Partner closely with the co-founders on product decisions. You’ll have real influence over what we build and how it feels + how it's designed.
What We're Looking For
You should be able to work anywhere in the stack (frontend, backend, infra, integrations) and you know how to make smart tradeoffs.
- Strong product sense: you’re obsessive about confusing UI and you want to make workflows feel magical.
- Systems thinking: you can design for latency, reliability, and iteration speed (especially for real-time voice + agent state).
- High ownership: you run toward ambiguity, unblock yourself, and care deeply about outcomes.
- Startup mindset: high-risk/high-reward energy, low ego, high pace.
Bonus Points
- Experience with agentic systems: LLM orchestration, tool calling, RAG, evals, prompt/versioning, guardrails.
- Voice/telephony or streaming experience (WebSockets/WebRTC, audio pipelines, turn detection).
- Messaging + deliverability experience (SMS workflows, email sending, compliance/opt-in, bounce handling).
- Familiarity with modern stacks (examples): TypeScript/Node, Python, React/Next.js, Postgres, Redis, queues, Docker, AWS/GCP, observability.