Founding Engineer

a16z; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Motherboard Labs is seeking a founding engineer to work directly with modern fleets, building specialized software while shaping the shared platform underneath deployments. You will be employee 3, helping define architecture, product direction, and engineering culture.

Expect to collaborate with customers, deploy tooling, optimize systems with trace data, and tailor models for firmware diagnosis. You will navigate startup pace with ownership and drive across multiple domains.

Qualifications

• Founding engineer with product deployment experience preferred.
• Experience improving platforms underneath customer implementations.
• Ability to work directly with demanding customers.

Responsibilities

• Shape the architecture and engineering culture as an early team member.
• Build integration and agent tooling for a key customer data source.
• Optimize harness capabilities using trace data to improve reliability.
• Fine-tune specialized models for firmware error diagnosis.
• Generalize repeated customer needs into shared platform services.
• Navigate the chaos of an early startup with ownership and accountability.

Skills

Founding engineer

Platform experience

Customer-facing

Education

CS/Math/Software Eng/Physics preferred

Job description

About Motherboard Labs

Motherboard Labs is building the operating layer for machines in the field. We work with companies running complex fleets of robots and other autonomous machines after those machines leave the prototype stage and enter real operations.

Today, large service teams manually search across telemetry, documentation, maintenance history, and tribal knowledge to diagnose failures. When a remote fix fails, they also often send contractors with little experience with these machines to fix them in the field. This process is inefficient, leading to high fleet downtime and making scarce technical expertise a bottleneck to fleet growth.

We deploy agents in the cloud and at the edge to allow these companies to surface relevant incidents, triage issues, capture what resolved them, and turn those learnings into reusable workflows/memory across deployments. Each deployment is built around the customer’s machines, telemetry, operating rules, people, and existing stack instead of forcing every fleet into a standard software.

Our founding team is ex-Citadel Securities and ex-Palantir. We are backed by a16z speedrun and are already deployed with robotic fleets. Modern, autonomous machines are already deployed in the world today (way more than you realize), and will be everywhere in the next few years. The most expensive part won’t be building them, it’ll be keeping them running. We need the team to build this future with us.

The role and what we require

We’re looking for a founding engineer who can work directly with modern fleets to build specialized software while also building the shared platform underneath each deployment. This is not a one-off implementation role. The challenge is to make each deployment reflect the reality of the customer’s fleet without creating a bespoke build for every customer.

You will be employee 3 and responsible for helping to shape the architecture, product, engineering culture, and customer-deployment model. Day to day could involve 1) interviewing company employees to understand their biggest challenges, 2) building integration and agent tooling for a key customer data source, 3) optimizing harness capabilities using trace data, 4) fine-tuning specialized models for firmware error diagnosis, 5) generalizing repeated customer needs into shared services for the platform, and much more.

You will be handling the chaos of an early startup and have to navigate difficult situations with customers, product decisions, time constraints. We will all be working closely but you need agency to run your own ship when everyone is spread thin, which is often the case! We value execution, speed, and accountability.

Who we’re looking for

The exact titles you’ve held matter less than the systems you’ve owned.
You may be a strong fit if you’ve been:

• A founding or early engineer who helped deploy a product with its first enterprise customers.

• A forward deployed engineer who kept improving the platform underneath customer implementations.

• A platform or infrastructure engineer who wants to work closer to customers and end users.

• An engineer in a field where software interacts with complex real-world systems.

We are looking for candidates who:

• Strong engineering background; CS, math, software engineering, physics preferred

• Have operated cross-functionally, whether at a startup wearing multiple hats or by driving product/commercial thinking at a larger company

• Has owned and shipped meaningful software

• Can work directly with demanding customers

• Can move between deployment work and platform architecture

• Will work in person and travel to customer sites 25-50% of the time

Nice to have:

• experience in robotics, autonomy, physical AI, fleet management, industrial or warehouse automation, IoT, or telemetry and observability.

• experience building systems with strong security practices around customer data, permissions, access controls, and data isolation.

Compensation

$150-200K base + 0.5-1% equity + benefits