Founding Backend Engineer Jobs in Arkansas (NOW HIRING)

Yask Founding Software Engineer
Department: Yask
Employment Type: Full Time
Location: Bentonville, AR
Compensation: $170,000 - $195,000 / year
Description
Build the Adaptive Intelligence Behind Physical Operations
Physical operations are where inventory moves, shifts change, timing matters, and small misses quietly become expensive problems.
Stores. Warehouses. Routes. Facilities. The places where execution actually happens.
What makes these environments hard to run well is not a lack of data or effort. It's that what matters changes constantly, responsibility passes across people and shifts, and follow-through gets lost between what someone noticed and what someone else was supposed to do.
Yask exists to close that gap.
We're building an AI-powered operating system that turns what people observe in the field and what gets buried in business data into the right next action, in the right place, in the right hands, at the right time, and then verifies it got done.
That requires more than prompts and dashboards.
It requires an adaptive system that can learn from messy real-world signals, remember context, orchestrate decisions, and improve from feedback over time.
That's what you'll help build.
We are starting in retail and distribution, where this problem is easy to see.
Out-of-stocks alone are an $80B+ annual issue in the US. But the bigger problem is that displays get missed, product doesn't get rotated, follow-through dies in text threads, and store-level issues stay buried in fragmented communication until they become costly.
We already have a live design partner operating across nine locations in Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas. We are not guessing where work breaks. We can see it.
You won't be building in a lab.
You'll be building against real workflows, real users, and real operational pressure from day one.
Why This Is a Rare Challenge for a Great Engineer
Many AI product roles begin with abstract use cases, internal demos, or synthetic datasets.
Yask starts with operating access.
The retailers, brands, distributors, buyers, and merchandisers whose decisions impact more physical locations than anywhere else in the world, within 30 miles of Bentonville. You will be right in the thick of it.
This is not a role where you optimize prompts in isolation.
This is a role where you:

• Watch how work actually happens
• See where execution breaks
• Design agentic systems, memory layers, and feedback loops that make that work easier
• Ship quickly, measure impact, and make the system sharper from real usage

You'll join a product that has already proven itself in the field and help evolve it into a scalable, production-ready platform capable of serving many customers.
This is a founding, hands-on software engineering role. In practice, that means you'll:

• Build and enhance our existing React web application and React Native mobile application
• Write clean, maintainable TypeScript across frontend and backend systems
• Expand the platform architecture as we grow from early customer validation toward a scalable production product
• Design and implement agent workflows, memory systems, and retrieval pipelines that improve operational decision-making
• Build feedback loops that allow the product to improve from customer interactions and field data
• Ship production-grade APIs, backend services, CI/CD pipelines, observability, and security improvements
• Instrument telemetry so we can measure usage quality, task success, system performance, and customer outcomes
• Work closely with product, design, leadership, and customers to rapidly build, test, and iterate on new capabilities
• Document architectural decisions and help establish engineering practices that will support future team growth

If this role is going well, the signs will be visible:
The product will be live inside the design partner's operation.
The system will be getting smarter from usage.
The next customers will be easier to win because the proof is concrete.
Our stack continues to evolve, but you'll spend much of your time working with:

• TypeScript
• React
• React Native
• Node.js
• PostgreSQL
• Modern LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, and others)
• Retrieval and memory architectures
• Cloud infrastructure (AWS and/or GCP)

This role fits engineers who like being close to the work while it is still unsettled.
People who recognize themselves in several of these:

• You've built and shipped production software in a startup or high-growth environment.
• You have strong experience with TypeScript, React, and React Native.
• You've built or scaled a mobile application used by real customers.
• You have experience integrating modern LLM APIs into production products.
• You understand concepts like retrieval, memory, and context engineering through practical experience.
• You've helped take products from early traction through rapid iteration and growth.
• You've worked closely with founders or held technical leadership responsibilities within a startup.
• You're comfortable making pragmatic engineering decisions that prioritize customer value.
• You enjoy ownership, ambiguity, and building alongside customers instead of behind closed doors.
• You enjoy ambiguity when it's paired with real ownership
• You want to be a founding engineer, not a ticket-taker
• You see Bentonville as a strategic advantage, not a compromise

This role is LESS likely to fit someone who prefers remote-first work, highly structured environments, or narrowly scoped engineering tasks.
What We Offer
This role comes with what strong founding engineers should expect: meaningful ownership, competitive compensation, and the opportunity to shape a product from its earliest stages.
More importantly, it offers the chance to become one of the first engineers defining how AI improves physical operations at scale.
Compensation

• Base salary: $170,000-$195,000 (flexible for exceptional candidates)
• Founding-team-level equity
• Relocation support

Benefits

• Health, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k) with company match
• Generous PTO
• Cell phone reimbursement
• Parking stipend
• Weekly team lunches
• Dog-friendly office
• Flexible, high-autonomy culture

Location and Work Style
This is a full-time, in-person role based in Bentonville, Arkansas.
We are open to exceptional candidates who are excited to relocate, but this is not a remote or hybrid position. The work benefits from close collaboration with customers, product decisions, and the founding team.
If you've been looking for a role where you can build modern AI-powered software, work directly with customers, and see the impact of your engineering almost immediately, this is that opportunity.
No cover letter. No generic note.
This is the Builder's Application. We think it does a much better job of highlighting your unique capabilities and qualities than a resume.
Don't spend time on polish. Raw, conversational, deeper narrative will give us a better signal of how great you are than a fancy deck. Notes, word doc, markdown file, notion, video - whatever works for you.
Click "Apply Now" to dive in.