About the job The Opportunity A stealth AI startup in San Francisco, founded by Harvard and MIT alumni, is building agents that handle complex, high-stakes paperwork for US families. They research what applies to each family, handle correspondence, and follow up over weeks. The product is running in test. You’ll be the first engineering hire, working directly with the two co-founders to take it live.
• You’re a Fit If YouAre high agency. You don’t wait for permission or perfect information. You see what needs doing and make it happen.
• Figure things out on your own. When something’s unclear, you research, decide, build, and check in with what you did, not with a list of questions.
• Are comfortable in an unstructured environment: no detailed specs, no fixed processes, no one assigning your day
• Have owned a product or major feature end to end, ideally as an early engineer at a startup
• Ship fast, with small changes daily, and know when scrappy is good enough
• Adapt easily when priorities shift mid-week. The product is early, and plans will change as users teach us things.
• Make product calls yourself and push back when you disagree, including with the founders
• Keep the team updated on what shipped, what’s blocked, and what needs a decision
• What You’ll Build Features end to end, from agent logic to the screen a family uses
• Agents with tool calling, guardrails, evals and tracing
• Long-running workflows that wait days for replies and survive restarts
• Secure handling of sensitive personal data Must-Haves: 5+ years of software engineering, with robust TypeScript across the stack (Node.js + React)
• Independent production ownership: you’ve designed, deployed and run features in production yourself,



including monitoring, debugging live issues and fixing what breaks, with no separate DevOps or QA team to lean on
• Built and shipped at least one LLM-powered feature or agent yourself: tool calling, structured/validated output, and handling model failures
• PostgreSQL and relational data modelling
• Background jobs, queues or workflow engines (e.g. Temporal, Inngest, Celery) that retry and survive failure
• Deploying on AWS or Azure: CI/CD, environment setup, logging and alerting
• Secure handling of sensitive data: access control, encryption, no secrets in code or logs
• Automated testing as a habit, including tests for model-driven behaviour
• Daily use of AI coding tools, with the judgement to review what they produce
• Excellent English; comfortable on camera for daily stand-ups Bonus: founding-engineer experience; Python, Go or Rust in production; agent frameworks (LangGraph, Claude Agent SDK, OpenAI Agents SDK); evals and observability for LLM systems; infrastructure as code (Terraform/Pulumi); document processing and OCR. Details
• Long-term engagement through Metric Tree Labs, dedicated to this client
• IST hours: 2:30–11:30 p.m. or 7:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m. (finalised after the first few weeks)
• Own laptop (16 GB+ RAM, disk encryption on)
• Process: Technical task, founder intro call → 90-min technical session. Quick decisions.
• Start: Immediately on finalisation
• To Apply Send your CV, a link to something you’ve shipped (repo, live product or demo), and 2–3 lines on a time you solved a problem with no guidance and no one to ask: what you did, and how fast you got it live. Requirements added by the job poster
• 5+ years of Software Development experience

📌 Founding Engineer (India)
🏢 Metric Tree Labs
📍 India