Senior Founding Engineer Jobs in San Ramon, CA (NOW HIRING)

San Francisco, United States | Posted on 05/26/2026

AI Talent Now, LLC is a powerhouse in direct-hire talent acquisition, connecting exceptional talent with industry-leading organizations across IT, Engineering, Financial Services & Fintech, and Manufacturing & Robotics. Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, we proudly serve clients and candidates nationwide.

This dynamic company is helping push the frontier of LLMs and AI Agents through novel datasets and experimentation. They work on building the most complex infrastructure that powers frontier data creation for agentic and hard‑reasoning workflows. They work with all 5 of the leading AI labs and are becoming the go‑to partner for data infrastructure for YC companies. They have a sharp hockey stick growth rate and are extremely talent‑dense, with most of our founding team coming from top IB and quant firms.

What we're looking for:

• Senior Software Engineer with 6-10 years of experience building and maintaining core infrastructure for a rapidly growing tech company.
• Comfortable architecting and developing shared infrastructure, mentoring junior engineers.
• Track record of building scalable, reliable, and high-throughput systems.
• Bonus points for experience in the human‑in‑the‑loop data space or at a high‑growth startup.

What you'll do:

• Design and build the core, shared infrastructure that powers all data generation platforms, human‑in‑the‑loop systems, and evaluation pipelines.
• Take ownership of foundational systems to ensure they are scalable and reliable for future growth.
• Work closely with vertical‑focused engineering teams to provide the platform and services they need to build quickly and effectively.
• Architect and develop scalable distributed systems capable of processing large‑scale datasets and high‑throughput workloads.
• Lead the charge on establishing engineering best practices for system design, deployment, and reliability.
• Mentor the entire junior engineering team, fostering a collaborative and high‑performance culture.

Seniority requirements:

• 6-10 years of experience building and maintaining platform infrastructure, still with full‑stack capabilities.
• Experience at VC‑backed startup, founding engineer at a company that raised $2.5M+, or from a company that specializes in managing data at scale (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks, Confluent).
• Strong experience building production distributed systems or platform infrastructure.
• Experience designing and operating systems in cloud environments (GCP or AWS).
• Experience at Amazon Mechanical Turk (not accepting other Amazon experience) or Meta GenAI team.

Education:

• Degree from a top‑30 US CS program. Others, including international undergrads, must have standout experiences.

Technical skills:

• Node.js or Python proficiency.
• Full stack with a backend and DevOps orientation.

Candidate requirements:

• 6-10 years of experience, full stack with a backend and DevOps orientation.
• Preferably with experience in the human data space or related fields.

Company context:

• Collaborative, open, and extroverted work culture with a focus on grinding and teamwork.
• Company built on verticals like healthcare and finance, requiring a strong foundational infrastructure.

Compensation and logistics:

• Salary range: $250k to $300k, with potential to flex for the right candidate.
• Includes 4% gross profit share as a bonus, with potential earnings up to $600k.

Timeline and urgency:

• New search, priority hire to be completed by end of Q2 (end of May, beginning of June).
• Urgent need for at least one senior engineer, possibly hiring two.

Pain points:

• Lack of a designated engineer to focus on core infrastructure; current team picking up slack.
• Need for scalable infrastructure to support future growth.

Ideal candidate profile:

• Prefer candidates with startup experience; hesitant about those with only big tech backgrounds unless showing strong commitment to startups.
• Looking for candidates ready to grind with willingness to take on startup challenges.

Interview process:

• Same as the current process, includes reference checks with one to two references.
• Possibility of adding a technical round before the take‑home assignment.

Technical requirements:

• Experience in infrastructure and full stack development with a possible DevOps angle.