Founding Engineer

Digital Waffle; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Digital Waffle, a high-growth AI-native startup, is hiring a Founding Engineer in San Francisco to join the earliest engineering hires and shape the architecture, culture and standards of what comes next.

You’ll ship production code from day one, make foundational architectural calls, sit alongside the founders on every product decision and set the bar as the team scales behind you. In this early role, you’ll own reliability, performance, and cost from the start.

Qualifications

• Founding engineer with startup experience
• Strong production experience in Python, TypeScript, React, and Next.js
• Track record of shipping end-to-end features
• Willing to make architectural decisions with partial information
• Fluent with AI engineering tools
• Available to work in-person five days a week in SF

Responsibilities

• Build core product features from end to end
• Define foundational architecture and tooling
• Ship iteratively based on user feedback
• Collaborate with founders on product direction
• Own reliability, performance, and cost from day one
• Help shape hiring and engineering culture

Skills

Python

TypeScript

React

Next.js

Architecture

End-to-end shipping

AI tooling

Early hire

Tools

Claude

Cursor

Job description

A high-growth AI-native startup is hiring a Founding Engineer in San Francisco to join the earliest engineering hires and shape the architecture, culture and standards of what comes next.

This is a proper founding role. You’ll ship production code from day one, make the foundational architectural calls, sit alongside the founders on every product decision and set the bar as the team scales behind you. Wide scope, no hand-holding, and ownership that only exists at this stage.

Location: San Francisco, 5 days per week in office

What you’ll be doing:

• Build core product features end to end across Python, TypeScript, React and Next.js
• Make foundational architecture, tooling and infrastructure decisions that will carry the product for years
• Ship fast, iterate on real user feedback and hold a high bar for what goes to production
• Work directly with the founders on product direction, prioritisation and technical trade-offs
• Own reliability, performance and cost from the start, not as later problems
• Shape hiring, engineering culture and standards as the team grows behind you
• Use AI tooling (Claude, Cursor and similar) across every part of your workflow

What you’ll need:

• Strong commercial engineering experience, ideally as an early hire at a fast-growing startup
• Strong Python, TypeScript, React and Next.js in production
• Track record of shipping product end to end, not just contributing to someone else’s codebase
• Comfortable making architectural calls with incomplete information and revisiting them when needed
• Fluent in modern AI engineering tools and able to use them to materially raise your output
• Happy working 5 days a week in-person with a small, high-intensity team

Nice to have:

• Prior Founding Engineer experience at a YC or similarly fast-growing startup
• Exposure to AI/LLM product work, agents or ML infrastructure
• A shipped side project you can talk about with real pride

This role would suit an engineer who wants to skip the layers, build alongside founders and put their name on the earliest bricks of something ambitious.