Founding AI & Cloud Engineer

David Joseph & Company; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

David Joseph & Company is seeking a Founding AI & Cloud Engineer in San Francisco to build our payments and agenting stack end‑to‑end. You’ll shape features from idea to production, balancing correctness, reliability and speed while working closely with the founding team.

This hands‑on role covers front end and back end, APIs, and ML‑driven components, with a focus on secure, scalable money movements and identity services.

Qualifications

• 0-3 years engineering experience.
• Agent harness / agent building experience.
• High agency, opinionated, generative thinker.
• SF North Beach, 5 days in‑person + occasional weekends.
• Scrappy AI‑native generalist (NOT 10‑year infra).
• Full‑stack experience (front and back end).
• Fluency in TypeScript, JavaScript, or Python.
• API design experience, clarity and stability.
• AWS familiarity and willingness to operate what you build.
• AI/Cloud experience.

Responsibilities

• Design and build features end‑to‑end across front end and back end.
• Build and improve experiences and services behind core products.
• Design and maintain APIs and integrations with documentation.
• Work on parts relying on LLMs and agents, including tooling and guardrails.
• Share responsibility for testing, monitoring, and operational health.

Skills

Agent harness / agent building

Full-stack development

TypeScript / JavaScript / Python

API design

AWS

AI / Cloud experience

In-person SF 5 days

In‑person collaboration

Tools

AWS

JavaScript

Python

TypeScript

Job description

San Francisco, CA · On-site · Full-timeCompensation: $150,000–$200,000 + 0–2% equity

About the Company

An early‑stage, pre‑seed FinTech startup building the financial infrastructure for the agentic web — giving AI agents a dependable way to reach businesses, prove who they are acting on behalf of, and pay for what they transact. Founded in 2025 by operators with deep payments backgrounds, the team is building toward end‑to‑end agentic purchasing, where an AI agent can autonomously transact across surfaces. Small team; early hires take real ownership of the systems the products depend on.Founded 2025 · 1–10 people · Industry: FinTech

The Role

We're hiring a Founding AI & Cloud Engineer to build our products end‑to‑end. You'll work across the stack — from the interfaces merchants and developers use to the services and data behind them — with particular focus on two core products: programmable, scope‑limited agent payment credentials, and agentic checkout that lets agents complete real transactions across commerce protocols and payment providers. You'll work alongside the founding team on the AI and agent features at the center of the product. This is a hands‑on, high‑agency role: you take features from idea to production, make the design decisions along the way, and operate what you ship. Because the products move money and assert identity on behalf of real people, correctness and reliability matter throughout the stack.

What you'll be doing

• Design and build features end‑to‑end, across front end and back end, choosing the right place in the stack to solve a given problem.
• Build and improve the experiences and services behind our two core products (programmable payment credentials and agentic checkout).
• Design and maintain the APIs and integrations that merchants, developers, and partners build on, with attention to clarity, stability, and good documentation.
• Work on the parts of the product that rely on LLMs and agents, including the tooling and guardrails that keep them dependable.
• Share responsibility for testing, monitoring, and operational health, holding a high bar for correctness as the product grows.

Tech stack: JavaScript‑based, with Python for MCP, all on AWS

Requirements

• 0-3 years engineering
• Agent harness / agent building experience
• High agency, opinionated, generative thinker
• SF North Beach, 5 days in‑person + occasional weekends
• Scrappy AI‑native generalist (NOT 10-year infra)
• Substantial full‑stack experience, front end and back end
• TypeScript, JavaScript, or Python fluency
• API design experience, clarity and stability
• AWS familiarity, willingness to operate what you build
• AI/Cloud experience

Green Flags

• Strong agent harness or agent building portfolio. Direct match for the product.
• Hackathon‑heavy background paired with shipping discipline. Demonstrates developer experience and agent integration intuition.
• Scrappy, AI‑native generalist with side projects and high agency.
• Fintech adjacency (Stripe, Plaid, Visa, crypto startups, payments tools)
• Comfortable being raw and malleable. Wants to take on more responsibility than they've had at this point in their career.

Red Flags

• 10-year infra engineer wanting Staff or Principal title.
• Pure rule‑follower who needs a spec to operate.
• Big‑team‑only background with no scrappy chapter. Case‑by‑case but generally not a fit.
• Cannot work SF in‑person 5 days a week + occasional weekends
• superficial understanding of agentic engineering. NEEDS to be deeply embedded in agentic engineering

Why Join

• Founding engineering seat with real latitude over both the product and how it gets built.
• A genuinely novel space — end‑to‑end agentic purchasing — working directly with the founding team.
• Full ownership across two core products, from user‑facing interfaces down to services, APIs, and data models.

Details

• Location — San Francisco, CA (North Beach)
• Work policy — On‑site, 5 days/week + occasional weekends, startup hours
• Compensation — $150,000–$200,000 + 0–2% equity
• Visa sponsorship — O‑1 available; H‑1B transfer + OPT supported
• Employment type — Full‑time