Founding Engineer

Empathic, Inc.; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 170,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

5 weeks PTO

Parental leave

Health (BCBS Platinum)

Job summary

Accelerate Agency in Real-World Software is expanding to build foundational tooling for agent workflows. You will join a team focused on user-centered infrastructure, developing Rust services, a SvelteKit frontend, and a unified tooling ecosystem.

The role emphasizes in-person collaboration in New York City, building essential developer tools while embracing a flexible, curious, and feedback-driven culture. Join us to shape how software is built and recorded across complex workflows.

Qualifications

• Curious mindset: asks why and how to apply answers.
• Caring about onboarding, code review, and team productivity.
• Flexible to switch tasks as customer priorities change.
• Seeks feedback and iterates toward a viable product quickly.

Responsibilities

• Build world-class tools and infrastructure used for mission-critical workloads.
• Pickup dropped balls and improve processes to launch features.
• Collaborate in-person in NYC with cross-functional teams.
• Build with the best technology to meet user needs with high quality.

Skills

Curious

Caring

Flexible

Seek feedback

Tools

Rust

axum

PostgreSQL

SvelteKit

path CLI

Job description

Accelerate Agency in Real-World Software

The expansion of agency is changing how software gets made. We're building the foundational record of that work: what an agent did, what a person corrected, and what happened after it shipped.

• Focusing on the user matters, even for infrastructure, especially for developer tooling. We care deeply about building products for real people.
• Software is becoming more dynamic and distributed. We are providing the tools to manage the evolving complexity.
• "AI" is the next wave of automation, and it applies to everything everywhere that software touches. Foundational change is necessary to unlock the potential promised.

How do we build for a world where most code is written in a conversation withan agent, and the record of how it got there is scattered across undocumentedsession logs?

Git collapses the story at merge time. The instruction, the tool calls, theapproach that was tried and abandoned, the correction a person made inreview — none of it survives, and every harness keeps its own private format.

Teams are already working this way and cannot answer simple questions about it:what a change actually cost, where the work got stuck, whether it held up afterit shipped.

We're building the human-centered tools to keep that record, own it, andlearn from it.

Build the future of agent infrastructure

New York, NY

Who you are

• Curious: Do you ask why? How do you apply the answers?
• Caring: Do you care when an onboarding flow has an extra unnecessarystep? If something in code review could be pushed to a linter, do you do thework to set it up for your team?
• Flexible: Can you switch what you're working on as customer demands orpriorities change?
• Seek feedback, not perfection: Perfect is the enemy of the good; do yourecognize when a 50% solution is good enough to test a hypothesis? Can youiterate quickly toward a sustainable product based on feedback?

Responsibilities

• Building world-class tools and infrastructure: our customers rely on us formission critical workloads, that comes with a responsibility to do good work
• Picking up dropped balls: see that some task is necessary to get a launch outthe door? Notice a process change that can improve team communication orproductivity? You are responsible for contributing to our collective destiny,so own it
• In-person collaboration in NYC
• Building in whatever technology best solves the problems at hand, where "best"means the one that meets the user where they are with a high qualityexperience

Technical context

• Pathbase (a permanent home for agent sessions)
  • Save your agent's history, mine that history to improve your work
  • Rust services on axum over Postgres
  • SvelteKit web app
• Toolpath (the open format underneath it)
  • One schema and intermediate representation across Claude Code, Codex, Pi, etc.
  • Full share/save/restore/resume across all agent providers.
  • Unified tooling story: write tools to do anything from compact aconversation, save a history, etc. all on an open stable format.
  • path CLI built as a session swiss-army knife.
• Infrastructure
  • High performance multi-threaded asynchronous Rust
  • Multi-cloud, hybrid, and on-prem deployment environments

Compensation

• Salary range: $170k–$250k
• Benefits: 5 weeks PTO (3 mandatory), parental leave, health (BCBS Platinum,family covered), vision, dental

If these problems matter to you and the role above isn't your shape, tell us what you have studied, built, or learned. Share a project, a piece of writing, or a question you have worked through that helps us understand your approach.