Help build an AI-native company from the early days

One of Swiss Founders Fund’s fast-growing portfolio ventures is hiring a Founding Engineer to help build and scale its core product.

The company is preparing its Y Combinator application and entering its next stage of product development. We are looking for a strong, independent engineer who can take ownership of substantial parts of the product, make sound technical decisions, and turn ideas into reliable software.

This is an early engineering hire with direct access to the founders and meaningful influence over the product and its technical foundations. It is an employed engineering role, not a co-founder position. Over time, there is potential to grow into Head of Engineering, depending on your contribution, leadership, and the company’s needs.

What you’ll do

- Own features and technical projects from defining the problem through implementation, testing, deployment, and ongoing improvement.
- Build across the stack, including user-facing features, APIs, backend services, and databases.
- Integrate AI models into product workflows and evaluate their quality, reliability, speed, and cost.
- Make practical architecture decisions that support current needs and leave room for growth.
- Improve performance, security, monitoring, and reliability as usage increases.
- Work directly with the founders to challenge assumptions, clarify priorities, and decide what to build.
- Establish useful engineering practices, including code reviews, testing, documentation, and reliable releases.
- As the team grows, help assess candidates, onboard engineers, and raise the quality of the team’s work.

What we’re looking for
- A record of shipping software. You have built, deployed,



and maintained products used by real people. You can explain what you owned, the decisions you made, and the tradeoffs involved.
- Strong technical fundamentals. You understand application architecture, APIs, databases, debugging, security basics, and production operations.
- The ability to work independently. You can take an ambiguous problem, break it down, and deliver a working solution without needing every step defined.
- Product judgment. You care about solving the user’s problem and can distinguish what needs careful engineering from what needs a easy first version.
- Practical experience with AI. You have built with LLM APIs or other AI systems and understand that a convincing demo is only the beginning.
- Ownership beyond the code. You follow through after release, investigate problems, and take responsibility for the result.
- Clear communication. You explain decisions plainly, surface risks early, and collaborate reliably with a remote team.
- An interest in technical leadership. You want to grow into helping other engineers succeed, alongside building software yourself.

We care more about the depth of your experience and the quality of your work than a particular degree, employer, or number of years on your CV.

Useful, but not required

- Experience as an early engineer at a startup.
- Experience scaling a product beyond its first users.




- Familiarity with AI evaluations, retrieval, model orchestration, or data pipelines.
- Experience hiring, mentoring, or leading other engineers.
- Experience balancing infrastructure and model costs with product quality.

We expect you to use modern development tools thoughtfully, including AI coding tools where useful. You should be able to understand, review, debug, and take responsibility for everything you ship.

Why join

- Build the core product of an AI-native company as part of its founding engineering team.
- Work directly with the founders and influence product and technical decisions.
- Take ownership of meaningful problems with room to make decisions and see their impact.
- Help shape the engineering culture and future team.
- Grow toward broader technical and people leadership, with the potential to become Head of Engineering.

This role will suit someone who enjoys early-stage work. Priorities can change, requirements will not always be fully defined, and you will be expected to contribute judgment as well as execution.

Working arrangement

This is a part-time, remote role for someone based in India. We need a consistent weekly commitment, agreed working-hour overlap with the team, and reliable communication.

About Swiss Founders Fund

Swiss Founders Fund is an entrepreneur-led early-stage venture capital firm based in St. Gallen, Switzerland, investing globally at pre-seed and seed stages. Through its investments and SFF Studio, it backs and builds technology companies with hands-on support from experienced entrepreneurs.

This role is with an SFF portfolio venture and focuses on building that company’s product.

📌 Senior Software Engineer (India)
🏢 Swiss Founders Fund
📍 India