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Senior Founding Engineer Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

Giga AI Inc

Senior Frontend Engineer

San Francisco, CA · On-site

$200K - $280K/yr

... Senior Frontend Engineer with deep prior experience with building functional & visually appealing ... Intro call w/ Founding Engineer (15 min) * Live coding round w/ Founding Engineer (1 hr) * In ...

RainesDev

Founding Backend Engineer

San Francisco, CA · On-site

Previous experience as a founder or founding engineer is highly preferred. Hard skills * Strong ... Simplify is looking for incredible senior software engineers willing to do IC. They should be ...

Casa, Inc

Senior iOS Engineer

San Francisco, CA · On-site

$164K/yr

About the role We're hiring a founding Senior iOS Engineer to help us design, develop, and ship best-in-class mobile applications that deliver exceptional value to our members. You'll work closely ...

Casa, Inc

Senior Backend Engineer

San Francisco, CA · On-site

About the role We're hiring a founding Senior Backend Engineer to help us design, develop, and ship robust backend systems that deliver exceptional value to our members. You'll work closely with our ...

Getcasa

Senior iOS Engineer

San Francisco, CA · On-site

$125 - $150/hr

About the role We're hiring a founding Senior iOS Engineer to help us design, develop, and ship best‑in‑class mobile applications that deliver exceptional value to our members. You'll work ...

Casa

Senior iOS Engineer

San Francisco, CA · On-site

$164K/yr

About the role We're hiring a founding Senior iOS Engineer to help us design, develop, and ship best-in-class mobile applications that deliver exceptional value to our members. You'll work closely ...

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Senior Founding Engineer information

What is a senior founding engineer?

Senior Founding Engineers are experienced technical professionals who join a startup at its earliest stages, often as part of the founding team. They are responsible for designing and building the initial product architecture, making critical technical decisions, and setting engineering best practices. In addition to hands-on coding, they often help shape the company's culture, contribute to hiring, and may participate in strategic business decisions. Their work significantly impacts the company's trajectory and future growth.

How does a senior founding engineer balance hands-on technical work with strategic decision-making in an early-stage startup?

As a Senior Founding Engineer, you’ll often juggle direct coding responsibilities with broader technical leadership tasks, such as setting architectural direction and influencing early product decisions. In a small, agile team, you’ll collaborate closely with other founders, designers, and sometimes initial customers to iterate rapidly on features while ensuring scalability and maintainability. The role demands adaptability—shifting between solving immediate technical problems and long-term planning to support growth. This dual focus is both a challenge and an opportunity for career development, as it provides visibility into all aspects of building a product and company from the ground up.

What are the key skills and qualifications needed to thrive as a senior founding engineer?

To thrive as a Senior Founding Engineer, you need deep expertise in software engineering, product development, and startup environments, usually demonstrated by a strong technical background and experience launching products from scratch. Familiarity with modern programming languages, cloud platforms, version control (e.g., Git), and agile development tools is essential, and experience with system architecture or DevOps is highly valued. Leadership, adaptability, and excellent problem-solving skills set standout candidates apart, as does the ability to communicate complex ideas to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. These skills are crucial for driving technical innovation, building scalable products, and shaping the culture and success of an early-stage startup.

What is the difference between Senior Founding Engineer vs Lead Software Engineer?

AspectSenior Founding EngineerLead Software Engineer
CredentialsTypically requires a bachelor's or master's in computer science or related field, with extensive experienceSimilar educational background, often with several years of software development experience
Work EnvironmentEarly-stage startups or new company divisions, often wearing multiple hatsEstablished teams within companies, focusing on project leadership and technical guidance
Industry UsageCommon in startups, tech companies, and entrepreneurial venturesWidely used across tech firms, especially in mid to large-sized organizations
Search & Comparison IntentUnderstanding roles in startup environments, founding responsibilitiesClarifying leadership roles in software development teams

The main difference is that a Senior Founding Engineer is typically an early team member in a startup, often involved in building the product from the ground up, while a Lead Software Engineer usually operates within established organizations, leading project teams and overseeing technical execution.

What are the most commonly searched types of Founding Engineer jobs in California?

The most popular types of Founding Engineer jobs in California are:

What are popular job titles related to Senior Founding Engineer jobs in California?

For Senior Founding Engineer jobs in California, the most frequently searched job titles are:

What job categories do people searching Senior Founding Engineer jobs in California look for?

The top searched job categories for Senior Founding Engineer jobs in California are:

What cities in California are hiring for Senior Founding Engineer jobs?

Cities in California with the most Senior Founding Engineer job openings:

Senior Founding Engineer jobs near you
Infographic showing various Senior Founding Engineer job openings in California as of September 2026, with employment types broken down into 1% Internship, 74% Full Time, 22% Part Time, and 3% Contract. Highlights an 85% Physical, 4% Hybrid, and 11% Remote job distribution.

Founding AI Engineer (Computer Vision)

EQL Tech

Burlingame, CA • On-site

$180K - $240K/yr

Full-time

Re-posted 12 days ago

Job description

Founding AI Engineer (Computer Vision)

On-site Engineering, Product & Tech Full time San Francisco, California, United States

Our client is a stealth, seed-stage startup building an AI-powered wearable platform for industrial field technicians - running a real-time computer-vision and agentic AI system directly on smart-glasses hardware, live today with major data-center, energy, and industrial customers across multiple countries. Backed by a $5M seed round and founded by researchers from Harvard/NASA (computer vision, published at NeurIPS and ICCV) and MIT (machine learning, ex-quant researcher).

The bet: computer vision and agentic vision-language models (VLMs) grounded in real integrations with legacy enterprise systems (ServiceNow, SAP, Salesforce) - not another LLM wrapper. The industrial data this generates is also laying the groundwork for robotics automation down the line.

As Founding AI Engineer, you'll own the AI core: an agentic vision-language model (VLM) system doing multimodal visual reasoning, evals, and model orchestration, running on real hardware against real industrial workflows - not benchmark demos.

What you'll do
  • Build and ship agentic VLM systems that reliably do visual reasoning in production (detection, segmentation, image/video understanding)
  • Own model orchestration and build real evals discipline (ground-truth, trajectory, or regression harnesses)
  • Work directly with the founding team, shaping the AI roadmap from day one
Location & culture

Fully on-site in the SF Bay Area. The founding team lives and works together for the first several months in a shared house before moving to a standard office - expect an intense, in-person, roughly 9-9-6 pace. Hours flex for exceptional, senior talent; the priority is getting the right person, not saving on salary.

Requirements

Essential

  • 1-5 years applied AI/ML experience, ideally computer vision or multimodal - a practical builder, not a career academic
  • Has shipped multimodal/CV systems to production in the VLM era, owning the model layer end-to-end
  • Applied VLM/multimodal engineering specifically - vision-language, not sensor-fusion, audio-only, or time-series
  • Applied agentic AI/model orchestration plus real evals discipline
  • Startup or AI-team production experience, ideally as founder/CTO/founding engineer

Particularly valuable

  • Edge/on-device inference; on-prem serving and fine-tuning (vLLM, SFT, quantization)
  • RAG against knowledge bases
  • Production AR/wearable AI or autonomous-driving CV experience
  • Industrial domain exposure

Benefits

Compensation & benefits
  • Base: $180K-$240K
  • Equity: 0.25%-0.75%
  • Visa sponsorship available (O-1, TN, E-3, H-1B1, H-1B transfer, F-1 OPT/STEM OPT)

How to apply: resume plus a short description of the most complex production VLM/CV system you've shipped.

Apply