Founding Engineer

TraceRoot.AI (YC S25); San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 220,000; Full time

Job summary

A cutting-edge technology startup in San Francisco is seeking a first engineer to collaborate with founders in building innovative AI products. This role requires strong full-stack development skills, particularly with React, TypeScript, and Node.js. Candidates should have a builder mindset and be able to work quickly within a startup environment. You will engage with users, ship new features rapidly, and maintain open-source projects as part of a dynamic team culture.

Qualifications

• You have shipped production features from start to finish.
• You thrive under pressure and solve hard problems efficiently.

Responsibilities

• Talk to users to improve AI and UX.
• Ship full-stack features for user applications.
• Maintain open-source projects to engage developers.
• Enhance AI agents' performance and reliability.
• Build robust infrastructure for telemetry events.

Skills

Strong full-stack experience with React, TypeScript, and Node.js

Strong sense of ownership

Strong communicator

Scrappy and execution-driven

Relentless builder mindset

Tools

Multi-agent systems

Observability tooling

Startup experience

Job description

TraceRoot.AI (YC S25) provided pay range

This range is provided by TraceRoot.AI (YC S25). Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience — talk with your recruiter to learn more.

Base pay range

$120,000.00/yr - $220,000.00/yr

As the first engineer at TraceRoot, you’ll work side‑by‑side with the founders to build the product and shape our engineering culture from the ground up. You’ll wear many hats, touching everything from AI systems and user‑facing features to backend infrastructure and open‑source SDKs. We move fast, debate hard, and execute even harder, shipping new features weekly and iterating live with users. You’ll work in person with the founders at least 3 days a week, white boarding, coding, and shipping together. If you love building fast, solving hard problems head‑on, and seeing your code impact real users within days, you’ll fit right in.

What You’ll Do

• Talk to users often to deeply understand how to improve TraceRoot’s AI and UX (you can expect to spend 10‑20% of your time on support)
• Ship full‑stack features and build the foundational building blocks that users will use to build their apps seamlessly
• Maintain our open‑source projects to help grow and engage our developer community
• Improve our AI agents’ performance, reliability, and edge‑case handling to continuously enhance AI output quality (for both function + design)
• Build robust infrastructure for our end‑to‑end platform to power millions of telemetry events

Requirements

• Strong full‑stack experience with React, TypeScript, and Node.js: you’ve shipped production features end‑to‑end
• Strong sense of ownership: you’re autonomous and own features from start to finish
• Strong communicator: you write clearly, think rigorously, and can collaborate well within small teams
• Scrappy and execution‑driven: you move fast, make pragmatic decisions, and care about results over process, bias for action is in your DNA.
• Relentless builder mindset: you thrive under pressure, love solving hard problems, and make things happen with limited resources

Preferred Experience

• Multi‑agent systems: you’ve designed or shipped multi‑agent systems, AI‑powered coding tools, LLM orchestration frameworks, or automated code workflows
• Observability tooling: you’ve built or contributed to systems like tracing pipelines, logging, search infra, metrics platforms, or other developer‑facing observability tools
• Startup experience: you’ve worked at early‑stage startups or have been a founder yourself

Seniority level

• Entry level

Employment type

• Full‑time

Job function

• Engineering and Information Technology
• Software Development

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