Founding Engineer

About this role

ABOUT THE ROLE

We're a Y Combinator-backed GovTech AI startup building AI-powered voice agents for local government departments — helping civil servants automate routine constituent inquiries, improve service responsiveness, and free up staff to focus on higher-value work. Our product handles calls 24/7 across dozens of languages and integrates with existing government technology stacks.

We're hiring a Founding Engineer to join our small, early team and help shape the technical foundation of the product. This is a high-ownership, high-impact role where you'll work directly with the founding team — making architecture decisions, shipping production features end-to-end, and helping define how we build as the company scales. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Design and implement core product features across the full stack — frontend, backend, and infrastructure.

- Own architecture and infrastructure decisions to support scalable, reliable production systems.

- Ship production-quality code quickly and iterate based on real user and customer feedback.

- Build and maintain APIs, services, and data models that power the product.

- Establish DevOps practices including CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, observability, and reliability standards.

- Collaborate closely with founders and cross-functional partners on product direction and priorities.

- Participate in customer conversations to translate needs into technical solutions.

- Help mentor and recruit early engineering hires as the team grows.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Must-haves:

- 3+ years of professional software engineering experience building and shipping production web applications.

- Proven experience shipping end-to-end features at an early-stage or small startup.

- Experience deploying and maintaining cloud-based services with CI/CD pipelines.

- Proficiency in at least one core backend language (e.g., Node.js, Python, or Go).

- Experience designing and consuming RESTful APIs with proper versioning and security considerations.

- Experience building MVPs and iterating quickly based on user feedback.

- Experience designing and working with relational and/or NoSQL databases, including data modeling.

- Full-stack development experience — backend APIs and frontend UI.

- Strong fundamentals in software design, algorithms, and system architecture.

- Excellent communication skills and a collaborative, product-minded approach.

Nice-to-haves:

- Frontend development experience with modern frameworks such as React or Vue, including responsive UI design.

- Experience with containerization and cloud-native architectures (Docker, Kubernetes).

- Experience with observability, monitoring, and error reporting tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Sentry).

- Background working on software for government, public sector, or similarly regulated domains.

COMPENSATION & BENEFITS

Compensation details were not specified for this role. Equity participation is expected given the founding-team nature of the position. Specific package details will be discussed during the interview process.

LOCATION

This is an on-site role based in Los Angeles, CA. Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States — visa sponsorship is not available.

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