Founding Engineer

Embedding VC; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, Dental, Vision insurance

401(k)

Lunch & Dinner in the office

Snacks and drinks

Latest macbook + iPad Air

Budget for software and models testing

Job summary

Embedding VC is seeking a founding engineer to help build core products and systems. Work directly with the CEO and CTO as part of an experienced team. You will design AI systems, implement features, and enhance product usability.

The ideal candidate has over 5 years of experience, expertise in React and Python, and a strong customer-first mindset. Enjoy a flexible work environment while contributing to innovative AI technologies.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering.
• Valid US Visa or work permit required.
• Willingness to work in San Francisco in-person 3 days a week.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement AI systems handling unstructured data.
• Ship full-stack features based on user feedback.
• Contribute to the product experience for engineers.

Skills

Experience in React

Experience in Python

Product-minded thinking

Customer-first approach

Ability to thrive in ambiguity

Tools

LLMs

Cloud Infrastructures

Observability tools

Job description

Let the Builders Build

TierZero’s mission is to accelerate software engineering. Today, engineers spend 50-70% of their time not building - chasing alerts, fighting fires, answering questions, and monitoring releases. We are building AI agents that take this work off their plate, unlocking creativity and speed. The opportunity is massive: a $1.5T productivity market waiting to be reclaimed.

Highlights

• Team: Our founding team is made up of pioneers in AI agents - staff and principal engineers who built foundational systems in the early days of Facebook, Databricks, LangChain, and Brex. CEO is a 2x founder with prior successful exits and owned cloud infrastructure at Pokémon GO. CTO was one of the first engineers at Databricks, where he led AI model serving and AI agent initiatives to $300M+ of revenue.

• Customers: We work with multiple enterprise engineering teams, all of whom have seen meaningful transformation in reliability and velocity, and consistently volunteer to act as customer references for us.

• Product: We’ve built an extensible agentic platform that unifies code, infrastructure, telemetry, and tribal knowledge. This provides full context across the entire engineering system to enable specialized AI agents for various tasks, from incident investigation to support engineering. In addition, we deliver accuracy at such a high level that we confidently provide the industry’s only 95% guarantee on agent outputs.

• Funding: We are backed by legendary investors including Accel and SV Angel, who are early investors in Facebook, Atlassian, Slack, and Stripe.

Background

Coding has become 10x easier with modern AI tools, yet engineering roadmaps haven’t gotten 10x faster. The bottleneck: alerts, incidents, support requests, deployments, performance issues, and the growing operational overhead of modern systems. TierZero solves this by deploying self-learning AI agents that handle these operational workflows end-to-end, giving engineers back their time and accelerating delivery.

1. Alerts and incidents: TierZero automatically runs impact and root cause analysis on top of existing telemetry, infrastructure, codebase, and documents. It proposes and executes code changes, rollbacks, and other remediation steps.

2. Support engineering: TierZero does not just answer common questions in #ask-infra or #ask-eng, it goes 3 steps further by investigating the underlying issue, pulling the necessary context, and taking custom actions to resolve the problem end-to-end.

3. Performance & Release engineering: TierZero understands how code behaves in production, spotting performance issues, hidden trends, and regressions as they emerge. It monitors releases, surfaces anomalies, investigates their root causes, and flags problems before they become incidents.

We’ve helped customers achieve 46% higher uptime while saving over 10,000 engineering hours per year.

Company Values

• Everything is Figure-out-able: We approach every challenge with creativity, optimism, and the belief that great teams can solve anything. There’s always a move.

• High Agency: We value autonomy, thrive in ambiguity, and are energized by ownership. We trust each other to make bold decisions, move fast, and turn ideas into wins for our customers.

• Wrong Answers Only: We welcome imperfect ideas, early thoughts, and bold guesses, because truth emerges faster when no one is afraid to speak up. Low ego, open debate, and psychological safety let us uncover these truths and act with conviction.

• Anti-996: Over half our team, including both founders, are parents. We don’t believe in 996 culture; we believe the mission is served by the intensity of our work, not the hours. We give each other the flexibility to show up fully in both work and life.

Role

As a founding engineer, you’ll help invent and build the core product and systems from the ground up. You’ll work directly with the CEO, CTO, and most importantly, our customers. Things change regularly, and here are examples of the types of work you’ll be working on:

• Design and implement agentic AI systems that reason about large sets of unstructured data

• Ship full-stack features with direct user feedback

• Contribute to the product experience so agents aren’t just smart, but usable and trusted by engineers

• Build systems to automatically evaluate LLM outputs and improve agentic reasoning through self-play and feedback loops

• Construct ML pipelines, including data ingestion, feature generation, embedding stores, RAG pipelines, vector search infra, and graph databases

• Explore and prototype with open-source and frontier LLMs to evaluate tradeoffs

• Build scalable infra to support long-running multi-step agents, including memory, state management, and async workflows

• Participate in everything from company strategy to customer calls to office snacks

Why work with us

• You want to work with an experienced team. CEO is 2x founder and infra leader with a previous successful exit; CTO spent a decade at Databricks, leading AI engineering

• You believe that everything is “figureoutable”. You iterate, try things, learn, and keep pushing. You want to learn and grow fast, and build something meaningful along the way.

• You’re excited to work at the frontier. Our tech stack is pushing the envelope on technology, touching Gen AI infra, LLMs, observability, distributed systems, and real-time data pipelines regularly. We blend hardcore engineering with applied research to solve real, unsolved problems.

• You want to shape the company from day one. You’ll influence product direction, culture, architecture, and how we scale.

• You believe that the engineers of tomorrow are 100x more productive than even the best engineers of today, and want to accelerate towards that future.

• Benefits:

  • Medical, Dental, Vision insurance, commuter, FSA/HSA
  • 401(k)
  • Lunch & Dinner in the office
  • Snacks and drinks
  • Latest macbook + iPad Air
  • Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, and near unlimited budget to test out new software and models

Looking for someone who

• Has a valid US Visa or work permit

• Work in SF in person 3 days a week

• 5+ years of experience

• Expertise in React and Python

• Thrives in ambiguity

• Is product minded & customer first thinking

• Interested in working with LLMs, MCPs, Cloud Infrastructures, and Observability tools

• Worked at a startup before and survived