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Founding Engineer Jobs in Virginia (NOW HIRING)

Neuroscale AI

Forward Deployed Engineer

Reston, VA · On-site

This is a hands-on, high-ownership opportunity for someone who has operated at a full-stack engineer, architect, or founding/lead engineer level and knows how to deploy production-grade systems that ...

Digital Consultants, LLC

Systems Engineer

Hampton, VA · On-site

Our founding principles, Fairness, and Common Sense make working here more than a job, it's the Digital family. Digital Consultants is looking for a Systems Engineer to help build out and maintain ...

Digital Consultants, LLC

Systems Engineer

Hampton, VA · On-site

Our founding principles, Fairness, and Common Sense make working here more than a job, it's the Digital family. Digital Consultants is looking for a Systems Engineer to help build out and maintain ...

VHB

Structural Bridge Engineer

Virginia Beach, VA · Hybrid

Overview ABOUT THE POSITION Structural Bridge Engineer | Richmond, Virginia | Virginia Beach, VA ... Since our founding, we have intentionally fostered a culture of inclusion and belonging, supported ...

VHB

Structural Bridge Engineer

Williamsburg, VA · Hybrid

Overview ABOUT THE POSITION Structural Bridge Engineer | Richmond, Virginia | Virginia Beach, VA ... Since our founding, we have intentionally fostered a culture of inclusion and belonging, supported ...

Digital Consultants LLC

Systems Engineer

Hampton, VA · On-site

Our founding principles, Fairness, and Common Sense make working here more than a job, it's the Digital family. Digital Consultants is looking for a Systems Engineer to help build out and maintain ...

VHB

Structural Bridge Engineer

Richmond, VA · On-site

Overview ABOUT THE POSITION Structural Bridge Engineer | Richmond, Virginia | Virginia Beach, VA ... Since our founding, we have intentionally fostered a culture of inclusion and belonging, supported ...

VHB

Structural Bridge Engineer

Richmond, VA · Hybrid

ABOUT THE POSITION Structural Bridge Engineer | Richmond, Virginia | Virginia Beach, VA ... Since our founding, we have intentionally fostered a culture of inclusion and belonging, supported ...

VHB

Structural Bridge Engineer

Richmond, VA · Hybrid

Overview ABOUT THE POSITION Structural Bridge Engineer | Richmond, Virginia | Virginia Beach, VA ... Since our founding, we have intentionally fostered a culture of inclusion and belonging, supported ...

Integral

Cybersecurity Engineer II

Tysons, VA · On-site

Overview The Cybersecurity Engineer II provides comprehensive cybersecurity support for the Product ... Since our founding in 1998, we have helped clients leverage existing and emerging technologies to ...

Integral

Cybersecurity Engineer II

Tysons Corner, VA

The Cybersecurity Engineer II provides comprehensive cybersecurity support for the Product Manager ... Since our founding in 1998, we have helped clients leverage existing and emerging technologies to ...

VHB

Transportation Roadway Engineer

Richmond, VA · Hybrid

$76K - $101K/yr

ABOUT THE POSITION TRANSPORTATION ROADWAY ENGINEER | RICHMOND, VA | VIRGINIA BEACH, VA | HYBRID VHB ... Since our founding, we have intentionally fostered a culture of inclusion and belonging, supported ...

VHB

Transportation Roadway Engineer

Richmond, VA · On-site

$76K - $101K/yr

Overview ABOUT THE POSITION TRANSPORTATION ROADWAY ENGINEER | RICHMOND, VA | VIRGINIA BEACH, VA ... Since our founding, we have intentionally fostered a culture of inclusion and belonging, supported ...

VHB

Transportation Roadway Engineer

Richmond, VA · Hybrid

$76K - $101K/yr

Overview ABOUT THE POSITION TRANSPORTATION ROADWAY ENGINEER | RICHMOND, VA | VIRGINIA BEACH, VA ... Since our founding, we have intentionally fostered a culture of inclusion and belonging, supported ...

VHB

Transportation Roadway Engineer

Virginia Beach, VA · Hybrid

$73K - $97K/yr

Overview ABOUT THE POSITION TRANSPORTATION ROADWAY ENGINEER | RICHMOND, VA | VIRGINIA BEACH, VA ... Since our founding, we have intentionally fostered a culture of inclusion and belonging, supported ...

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How much do founding engineer jobs pay per year?

As of Jun 15, 2026, the average yearly pay for founding engineer in Virginia is $68,767.00, according to ZipRecruiter salary data. Most workers in this role earn between $51,100.00 and $77,800.00 per year, depending on experience, location, and employer.

What are the biggest challenges a Founding Engineer typically faces at an early-stage startup?

As a Founding Engineer, you’ll often be tasked with building a product from the ground up while balancing rapid development with long-term technical vision. Resource constraints and evolving product requirements can require creative problem-solving and the ability to prioritize effectively. You’ll work closely with the founding team, making pivotal decisions that shape both technology and culture, so adaptability and a hands-on approach are important. While the environment can be demanding and ambiguous, it also offers unique opportunities to learn, take ownership, and have a major impact on the success of the company.

What is a Founding Engineer job?

A Founding Engineer is one of the first technical hires at a startup, responsible for building the company's core products and setting the foundation for its technology stack. They work closely with the founders, making key architectural decisions, writing production-ready code, and often wearing multiple hats across engineering, product, and strategy. This role requires a mix of deep technical expertise, problem-solving skills, and adaptability to thrive in a fast-paced, early-stage environment.

What are the key skills and qualifications needed to thrive in the Founding Engineer position, and why are they important?

To thrive as a Founding Engineer, you need deep expertise in software development, system architecture, and product design, typically backed by experience with startups or building products from scratch. Familiarity with modern programming languages, cloud platforms, and agile tools such as Git, AWS, and Jira is often essential. Exceptional problem-solving, strong ownership mentality, and the ability to communicate clearly in fast-paced, unstructured environments set standout candidates apart. These skills are crucial because Founding Engineers must quickly turn vision into reality, adapt to changing needs, and help establish the technical foundation of a new company.

What are the most commonly searched types of Founding Engineer jobs in Virginia? The most popular types of Founding Engineer jobs in Virginia are:
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Founding Engineer jobs near you

Forward Deployed Engineer

Neuroscale AI

Reston, VA • On-site

Full-time

Posted 13 days ago

Job description

About Neuroscale
Neuroscale is building the AI recruiting operating system, one unified platform for your entire talent organization, from first touch to hired. Arbi eliminates fragmented workflows, integrates directly with your ATS, and orchestrates AI agents for sourcing, outreach, screening, and candidate intelligence end-to-end. By combining reasoning-optimized models with deep workflow automation, Arbi helps talent teams win more top candidates with dramatically less friction.
We're backed by top operators and investors, and we're growing fast. Our momentum is further fueled by blue-chip partners and programs, including the NVIDIA Inception Program, the HPE Unleash AI Program, and our active DoD SBIR Phase II award and contract.
We're now hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to help accelerate adoption of Arbi in both federal & commercial space to help us dominate one of the largest and fastest-expanding categories in modern software. This is not a maintenance role. This is a hands-on, high-ownership opportunity for someone who has operated at a full-stack engineer, architect, or founding/lead engineer level and knows how to deploy production-grade systems that scale.
The Role
As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Neuroscale AI, you will be the technical bridge between our customers and our product. You will work directly with customers to understand their recruiting workflows, configure and deploy Arbi, integrate with their existing systems, and build production-ready solutions that deliver measurable impact.
This is a hands-on engineering role with significant customer exposure. You will write code, design integrations, build prototypes, configure AI workflows, troubleshoot deployments, and work closely with product and engineering to turn customer feedback into scalable product improvements.
This role is ideal for an entrepreneurial engineer who enjoys the intersection of software engineering, AI implementation, solution architecture, technical consulting, and customer success.
What You'll Do
Customer Deployment & Technical Delivery
  • Own customer deployments from discovery through go-live, including workflow mapping, solution design, implementation, testing, launch, and post-launch optimization.
  • Work directly with recruiting leaders, HR teams, talent acquisition operations, IT/security teams, and executive stakeholders to understand business goals and translate them into technical solutions.
  • Configure and customize Arbi workflows for use cases such as resume screening, candidate matching, recruiter copilots, automated outreach, interview workflows, compliance review, talent pipeline analytics, and enterprise reporting.
  • Build and maintain integrations with ATS, HRIS, CRM, LMS, identity providers, email/calendar systems, job boards, and customer data environments.
  • Support production rollouts for enterprise, public sector, and higher-education customers.

AI Workflow Engineering
  • Design and implement AI-powered workflows using LLMs, RAG, structured evaluation rubrics, candidate scoring logic, document intelligence, and agentic automation.
  • Help customers define evaluation criteria, scoring rubrics, workflow automation rules, and human-in-the-loop review patterns.
  • Work with product and ML teams to improve prompt chains, model evaluation, retrieval quality, explainability, auditability, and customer-specific performance.
  • Support safe, reliable, and explainable AI deployments with clear logging, traceability, monitoring, and customer-facing outputs.

Product Feedback & Internal Collaboration
  • Serve as the voice of the customer to the product and engineering teams.
  • Identify repeatable customer patterns and turn them into reusable templates, product features, implementation accelerators, and reference architectures.
  • Write clear technical documentation, deployment guides, integration notes, customer playbooks, and implementation best practices.
  • Partner with sales, customer success, product, and engineering teams during pilots, demos, enterprise evaluations, renewals, and expansions.

Technical Problem Solving
  • Troubleshoot integration issues, API failures, data mapping problems, authentication flows, permissions, system performance, and customer environment constraints.
  • Rapidly prototype solutions when customer requirements are ambiguous or evolving.
  • Make practical engineering tradeoffs to deliver customer outcomes quickly without introducing unnecessary complexity.
What We're Looking For
Required Qualifications
  • 5+ years of experience in software engineering, solution engineering, technical consulting, customer-facing engineering, implementation engineering, or forward deployed engineering.
  • Strong hands-on programming experience with Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, Node.js, or similar modern languages.
  • Experience building or integrating production software systems using REST APIs, webhooks, OAuth, SSO/SAML, databases, cloud services, and enterprise application integrations.
  • Experience working with cloud environments such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
  • Strong understanding of modern AI/ML and GenAI concepts, including LLMs, RAG, embeddings, vector search, prompt engineering, evaluation, and workflow orchestration.
  • Ability to work directly with enterprise IT and security teams on authentication, access control, logging, data privacy, data residency, and deployment requirements.
  • Excellent communication skills with the ability to explain technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
  • Strong ownership mindset, customer empathy, and ability to operate in ambiguous, fast-moving environments.
  • Willingness to travel for customer workshops, onsite deployments, executive briefings, and go-lives.

Preferred Qualifications
  • Experience deploying AI, SaaS, HR Tech, recruiting tech, workflow automation, document intelligence, or enterprise analytics platforms.
  • Experience integrating with systems such as Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS, Bullhorn, Salesforce, HubSpot, ServiceNow, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, or similar enterprise platforms.
  • Experience with databases and search systems such as PostgreSQL, Redis, OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Pinecone, Weaviate, or other vector databases.
  • Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, observability tools, and production monitoring.
  • Experience in public sector, federal, higher education, staffing, HR, talent acquisition, or workforce development environments.
  • Prior experience at an early-stage startup or in a high-growth customer-facing technical role.

Who You Are
  • You are a builder who likes being close to the customer.
  • You are comfortable writing code one day, leading a customer workshop the next, and helping product prioritize roadmap items the day after that.
  • You can take an ambiguous business problem, break it down, design a technical path forward, and ship a working solution.
  • You have low ego, high ownership, and strong judgment.
  • You care about customer outcomes, but you also care about building repeatable product capabilities rather than one-off services.
  • You are excited about the opportunity to help define how AI transforms recruiting, talent assessment, workforce planning, and enterprise decision-making.

What's In It For You
  • Join a tight-knit team building one of the most ambitious AI-native recruiting platforms in the market.
  • Work directly with founders, customers, product leaders, and engineering teams.
  • Help shape how Arbi is deployed across commercial, public sector, higher education, and enterprise environments.
  • Competitive salary, meaningful early-stage equity, and flexible work arrangements.
  • High trust, low bureaucracy, and a culture of ownership.
  • Opportunity to build reusable deployment patterns, customer accelerators, and product capabilities that define the future of Neuroscale AI.

Compensation
Base salary range: $125,000-$180,000, based on experience, location, and scope of responsibility.
This role also includes meaningful early-stage equity and the opportunity to have a direct impact on the growth and success of Neuroscale AI.
Equal Opportunity Statement
Neuroscale AI is an equal opportunity employer. We value diverse perspectives and are committed to building an inclusive team. We encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply, especially those who are excited to help build the future of AI-powered recruiting and workforce intelligence.

Apply