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Technical Founder Jobs (NOW HIRING)

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Engineer in Residence: MarketRadar

Mountain View, CA

$116K - $149K/yr

The residency is designed to test whether this can become a venture-scale company and whether you are the right technical founder to lead it. - This is an on-site Engineer in Residence residency at ...

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ModJob

Technical Co-Founder

Baltimore, MD

$37K - $43K/yr

I am looking for my technical partner. Someone who believes succeeding is a team sport, and a healthy culture is good for business. We will work together to revolutionize how organizations innovate ...

Tessera Labs

Deployed Engineer

... technical founder • Strong hands-on experience with Python and JavaScript/TypeScript • Experience building production-grade AI systems (experience at a frontier AI lab or top AI application ...

Ramp

Technical Program Manager

New York, NY · Remote

$144K - $269K/yr

Background as a software engineer or technical founder * Familiarity with how LLM-based systems are built and deployed -- enough to have a meaningful technical conversation with the engineers ...

Ramp

Technical Program Manager

New York, NY · On-site

$144K - $269K/yr

Background as a software engineer or technical founder * Familiarity with how LLM-based systems are built and deployed - enough to have a meaningful technical conversation with the engineers building ...

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Technical Founder information

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$19K

$44.3K

$76.5K

How much do technical founder jobs pay per year?

As of Jul 6, 2026, the average yearly pay for technical founder in the United States is $44,267.00, according to ZipRecruiter salary data. Most workers in this role earn between $37,500.00 and $44,000.00 per year, depending on experience, location, and employer.

What are the key skills and qualifications needed to thrive as a Technical Founder, and why are they important?

To thrive as a Technical Founder, you need deep expertise in software development, product design, and systems architecture, often demonstrated by a degree in computer science or extensive industry experience. Familiarity with programming languages, cloud platforms, and agile project management tools is essential, along with a strong understanding of startup and product lifecycle processes. Exceptional problem-solving, leadership, and communication skills help drive vision, build teams, and attract investors. These skills and qualities are crucial for building scalable products, leading a technical team, and driving the company toward sustainable growth.

What is a Technical Founder?

A Technical Founder is an entrepreneur who establishes a startup or company and brings significant technical expertise to the founding team. They are typically responsible for developing the core product, overseeing technology strategy, and building the initial technology infrastructure. Technical Founders often have backgrounds in software engineering, product development, or related technical fields. Their role is crucial in ensuring the startup’s product is viable, scalable, and innovative. They may also participate in fundraising, hiring, and overall business strategy.

What is the difference between Technical Founder vs Product Manager?

AspectTechnical FounderProduct Manager
Required credentialsTechnical degree, coding skills, startup experienceBackground in business, marketing, or product design
Work environmentFounding team, startup, early-stage companyEstablished companies, tech firms, product teams
Industry usageStartup ecosystem, tech industryTech, software, digital products

The Technical Founder typically has technical expertise and plays a key role in building the product from inception, often founding the company. In contrast, a Product Manager focuses on guiding product development, strategy, and user experience within an existing organization. While both roles require understanding of technology and product development, the Technical Founder is more involved in technical creation and startup leadership, whereas the Product Manager emphasizes product strategy and market fit.

What are some common challenges Technical Founders face when transitioning from product development to team leadership?

Technical Founders often excel at building the initial product but may find it challenging to shift their focus to hiring, managing, and leading a growing team. As the company scales, responsibilities move from hands-on coding to mentoring engineers, setting technical direction, and aligning with business goals. Balancing technical debt, product vision, and team dynamics requires new skills in delegation and communication. Embracing this transition is crucial for both personal growth and the company's long-term success.
What job categories do people searching Technical Founder jobs look for? The top searched job categories for Technical Founder jobs are:
Technical Founder jobs near you
Infographic showing various Technical Founder job openings in the United States as of June 2026, with employment types broken down into 2% Internship, 2% As Needed, 33% Full Time, 6% Part Time, 49% Contract, and 8% Nights. Highlights an 91% Physical, 3% Hybrid, and 6% Remote job distribution, with an average salary of $44,267 per year, or $21.3 per hour.

Engineer in Residence: MarketRadar

career

Mountain View, CA

$116K - $149K/yr

Contractor

Posted 2 days ago

Be an early applicant

Job description

This role is to build MarketRadar, an AI-native commercial action layer for SKU-heavy manufacturers. Category, pricing, product, and sales enablement teams need to understand fast-moving competitive changes across many products, configurations, price bands, channels, and geographies. The hard part is not collecting more data. The hard part is turning fragmented market signals into a defensible recommendation about what to do with the company's own portfolio, pricing, positioning, inventory, and sales motion.
The first wedge is for OEM commercial teams that manage complex hardware portfolios. Existing digital shelf and price monitoring products are built for a retail lens: price, promotion, availability, and assortment. MarketRadar is built for the OEM lens: how a competitor's price, volume, configuration, channel, or portfolio move should change the OEM's own commercial action.
AI Fund is working with an enterprise design partner on the problem. The residency is designed to test whether this can become a venture-scale company and whether you are the right technical founder to lead it.
- This is an on-site Engineer in Residence residency at AI Fund headquarters in Mountain View, CA.
- Residency length is typically 10 to 12 weeks. Compensation is paid for the duration of the residency.
- The residency is designed to test founder-market fit. Strong performance is the path to a founding role at the spun-out venture.
- You should be ready to ship a working prototype in weeks, not months.
- Candidate-facing materials should not include enterprise partner confidential data, figures, slides, or internal analysis. Prototype work uses synthetic data.
What you'll build
  • A synthetic but realistic market-signal pipeline that ingests competitor portfolio data, channel movement, sell-out velocity, pricing, and configuration changes.
  • A spec-aware entity resolution system that maps competitor SKUs and portfolio restructures against the customer's own lineup without relying on name matching.
  • A recommendation engine that turns detected changes into commercial actions such as monitor, promote an adjacent SKU, adjust price, update positioning, flag a portfolio gap, or investigate a future configuration change.
  • A constraint layer that makes recommendations respect the customer's own cost, margin, inventory, channel, and sales enablement realities.
  • A monitoring and alerting workflow that can run continuously, surface changes proactively, and improve from user feedback.
What you'll do
  • Own the technical build from data model and ingestion through entity resolution, signal detection, recommendation logic, and operator workflow.
  • Work directly with AI Fund's build team and enterprise users to pressure-test the wedge, prototype, and customer workflow.
  • Decide which workflow ships first: competitive portfolio remapping, volume/configuration traction detection, win/loss intelligence, sentiment mining, or supply chain and lead-time signals.
  • Build evaluation loops for recommendation correctness, false remaps, hallucinated spec drivers, and constraint failures.
  • Design for enterprise trust from the beginning, including data isolation, sandboxed agents, auditability, and cost-conscious model routing.
  • Move quickly from prototype to a pilotable system while keeping the core technical judgment explicit.
What you need
  • Strong hands-on engineering ability across backend systems, data products, and AI-native workflow software.
  • Experience with messy structured or semi-structured data, such as product catalogs, SKU normalization, taxonomy mapping, pricing data, GTM data, sales enablement systems, CRM data, or supply chain signals.
  • Judgment about entity resolution, recommendation systems, monitoring, evaluation, and model orchestration.
  • Comfort building for enterprise buyers where security posture, audit trails, and deployment trust matter from day one.
  • Evidence that you can use AI coding assistants and modern AI tools to move faster without outsourcing engineering judgment.
  • Founder-level curiosity about the customer workflow, not just the model or dashboard.
  • US work authorization. We are unable to sponsor visas for this role.
Helpful but not required
  • Experience in OEM, manufacturing, consumer electronics, commerce infrastructure, retail pricing, catalog systems, market intelligence, competitive intelligence, sales intelligence, RevOps data products, or channel analytics.
  • Experience building agentic monitoring, proactive alerting, eval harnesses, model routing, open-source model deployment, or token-cost optimization in production.
  • Experience with category planning, commercial strategy, pricing optimization, product taxonomy, SKU enrichment, win/loss analysis, or supply chain visibility.
  • Founder, founding engineer, or senior IC experience in a B2B software company.
Who this is for
  • A technical founder who likes hard data and workflow problems where the product must make a decision, not just explain a chart.
  • Someone who can reason about messy market signals, customer constraints, enterprise deployment, and product wedge at the same time.
  • A builder who sees the opportunity to turn competitive intelligence into an OEM-native action system.
- Competitive residency compensation, paid for the duration of the engagement.
- Equity consideration at founding-team terms if the venture spins out and you become a founder.
- AI Fund covers tools, infrastructure, and compute needed during the residency.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.