Founding Engineer

Bench; Canada; On-site; CAD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health and medical benefits

Significant equity

Job summary

Bench is building a data-driven operating model for the physical world, starting with high‑volume, tight‑margin contracted operations. As a founding engineer in Canada, you will shape the product, the stack, and the company from the ground up while collaborating with the founders and a small, talented team.

You’ll tackle diverse data challenges, design AI-native architectures, and ship features directly to customers.

Qualifications

• Raw talent and problem-solving ability
• Product mindset: shipping from idea to customer
• AI-native architecture mindset

Responsibilities

• Architect AI-enabled data infrastructure and architecture for scalable operations.
• Ship end-to-end product features with measurable impact for customers.
• Collaborate directly with founders and the core team to shape the product and stack.

Skills

Raw talent

Product mindset

AI-native

Versatility

High standards

Job description

Bench is building the operating model for the physical world: one live model of every worker, asset, contract and minute of work, and whether that time created value or waste. As AI and robotics take on more of how operations run, that model becomes the source of truth everything runs on.

We're starting with contracted operations that run on heavy labor and tight margins: transit, mining, utilities and facilities. They generate more data than ever, yet still run on spreadsheets. Bench builds the data and AI infrastructure that powers them.

We've raised VC funding, we're still in stealth, and we're already shipping with some of the largest operators in North America. benchdata.ai

The role

This is a founding engineer role at an early-stage startup, and we're looking for extremely talented people. Senior and staff engineers at top tech companies, ex-technical founders, or anyone else, whatever your background. It's a rare chance to shape the product, the stack and the company from the ground up. The role is based in Canada, so you'll need to be authorized to work here.

You'll work directly with the founders and the rest of the team. Esteban Sanchez (CEO) has spent over a decade as a founder and CTO building complex enterprise data software for Fortune 500 companies, and Jacob Greig (Co-founder) brings years inside the industry, from operations consulting at PwC to scaling sales at a transport-tech company.

What you'll work on

We have a ton of different challenges, and the work is versatile. You'll tackle deep, complex data problems and ship features directly to customers. Some of it:

• AI engineering. Pushing how much more we can do with AI than we believe possible: AI layers combined with a strong deterministic foundation that makes the results trustworthy.
• Data infrastructure. Our entire stack runs on AWS, with our own data lake, ingestion pipelines, data modeling layers, DuckDB compute, and deep AI integrations throughout the system.
• Product. Features and interfaces that operators rely on every day.

Codebase uses Nodejs (Fastify), Python, Tofu, DuckDB, PostgresSQL, S3 lake, Inngest, AI SDKs and more.

What we're looking for

• Raw talent. Intelligence and problem-solving ability matter more to us than your résumé.
• Product mindset. You care about solving the problem, not just writing the code. In the age of AI, we expect engineers to ship A to Z: understand how customers use the product, prioritize the work, write the requirements, build, test and deploy.
• AI-native. You use AI to ship fast without letting quality slip. AI does the heavy lifting; you own the architecture, the tests and the judgment calls.
• Versatility. You're as comfortable deep in a data pipeline as you are shipping an end-to-end feature.
• High standards. This role comes with high expectations, and the upside to match.

Compensation

• Health and medical benefits
• Significant equity: you'll be one of our earliest employees and own a real piece of what we build