Founding Engineer

talentpluto; New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

TalentPluto, an early-stage AI startup in New York City, is hiring its first Founding Engineer to shape the technical direction and own major parts of the product and stack. You’ll design, build, and ship features end-to-end, from data models and APIs to user interfaces, while setting foundations for infrastructure and engineering processes.

You’ll work directly with the founders and customers, help interview and onboard future engineers, and influence architecture, tooling, and best practices.

Qualifications

• Experience shipping real products end-to-end at a startup or small, fast-moving team.
• Comfortable across the stack (frontend, backend, databases, and occasionally mobile).
• Enjoy owning problems, not just tasks, and care deeply about user outcomes.
• Able to work with ambiguous specs and iterate directly with founders and users.
• Value clean, pragmatic engineering: tests, clear abstractions, and simple designs.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and ship features across the stack, from backend data models and APIs to user-facing interfaces.
• Collaborate directly with the founders and customers to turn fuzzy requirements into simple, shipped solutions.
• Help choose core tools, frameworks, and architectural patterns for the platform.
• Set up and maintain foundations for infrastructure, including CI/CD, observability, testing, security, and performance baselines.
• Establish engineering best practices such as code review norms, testing standards, and release processes.
• Contribute to building pipeline management UIs, multi-tenant systems, and integrations with payments and external services.
• Help interview, hire, and onboard future engineers and contractors as the team grows.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex production issues, and contribute to documentation and internal tooling where needed.

Skills

End-to-end shipping

Full-stack development

Startup experience

Ownership

Clear communication

Tools

React

Next.js

TypeScript/JavaScript

PostgreSQL

Node.js

Drizzle ORM

Vercel

Job description

Location: New York City
Industry: AI / Recruiting / HR Tech
Compensation: Competitive salary + meaningful early equity

About the Company

TalentPluto is an early-stage AI startup building an autonomous recruiting platform that rethinks how companies hire. Our AI agents conduct candidate screening calls, engage in real-time conversations with hiring managers, and orchestrate complex recruiting workflows using cutting-edge large language models, voice AI, and workflow automation.

We ship quickly with real users, learn from feedback, and optimize for simple, pragmatic solutions. We operate with high trust, high ownership, and a strong focus on building tools that meaningfully improve how hiring gets done.

The Opportunity

We're hiring our first Founding Engineer to help define TalentPluto's technical direction and own major parts of the product and stack. This role is ideal for someone who enjoys building products end-to-end, working closely with founders and customers, and shaping both the architecture and the culture of an engineering organization from day one.

You’ll design, build, and ship features across the stack, from data models and APIs to polished UI. You’ll also set the foundations for our infrastructure, processes, and best practices, and play a key role in hiring and onboarding future engineers. This is a broad, high-impact role for someone who wants ownership rather than a narrow "tickets" lane.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and ship features across the stack, from backend data models and APIs to user-facing interfaces.
• Collaborate directly with the founders and customers to turn fuzzy requirements into simple, shipped solutions.
• Help choose core tools, frameworks, and architectural patterns for the platform.
• Set up and maintain foundations for infrastructure, including CI/CD, observability, testing, security, and performance baselines.
• Establish engineering best practices such as code review norms, testing standards, and release processes.
• Contribute to building pipeline management UIs, multi-tenant systems, and integrations with payments and external services.
• Help interview, hire, and onboard future engineers and contractors as the team grows.
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex production issues, and contribute to documentation and internal tooling where needed.

Requirements

You may be a strong fit if you:

• Have experience shipping real products end-to-end at a startup or small, fast-moving team.
• Are comfortable working across the stack (frontend, backend, databases, and occasionally mobile).
• Enjoy owning problems, not just tasks, and care deeply about user outcomes.
• Are comfortable working with ambiguous specs and iterating directly with founders and users.
• Value clean, pragmatic engineering: tests, clear abstractions, and simple designs over unnecessary complexity.
• Communicate clearly, give and receive feedback well, and collaborate effectively with non-engineers.
• Startup experience.

Technical requirements:

• TypeScript or JavaScript
• React and Next.js (including App Router and Server Components)
• Full-stack development across frontend, backend, and databases
• AI and LLM integrations (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, RAG, embeddings)
• PostgreSQL and SQL
• System design and architecture (scalable, reliable services)

Nice to have

• Exposure to AI, data, infrastructure, devtools, or voice/audio systems
• Comfort with our stack: React, TypeScript, Next.js, Node, Drizzle ORM, PostgreSQL, Trigger.dev, Retell, Twilio/Telnyx, Upstash, Vercel or AWS
• Experience setting up analytics, experimentation, or data pipelines
• Prior work on developer tools, internal tools, or reliability-critical workflows
• Experience with Slack/Discord bots or other conversational interfaces
• Familiarity with testing frameworks (e.g., Jest, Playwright)