Founding Engineer

LYA Collective; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Founding role

Highly competitive salary

Generous equity participation

Health, vision, and dental insurance

Job summary

LYA Collective in San Francisco, CA is seeking a Founding Engineer to build and scale their platform from the ground up. This 0-to-1 role offers significant ownership over product, architecture, LLM systems, and data models for real enterprise customers.

You'll join a growing team and work directly with founders, customers, and GTM to move the product forward with high autonomy and impact.

Qualifications

• BS in Computer Science or related field.
• Relational database schema design and distributed systems fundamentals.
• 1-8 years of experience in full-stack software engineering, with focus on Python and LLM systems.
• Startup, founding, or 0-to-1 ownership (small startup is accepted too).

Responsibilities

• Architect and ship agentic workflows and RAG pipelines in production for external enterprise customers.
• Design the relational schemas and scalable pipelines the platform runs on.
• Own features and products outright, with full autonomy over driving the outcome.
• Collaborate with go-to-market and get on customer calls when it moves the product forward, no translation layer required.
• Turn what Fortune 50 accounts tell us into fast, continuous improvements to the platform.

Skills

LLM systems

Agentic workflows

RAG pipelines

Full-stack software engineering

Education

BS in Computer Science

Tools

Next.js

React

Job description

About The Opportunity

I’m partnering with an early-stage startup that is looking for a Founding Engineer to help build and scale their platform from the ground up. This is a true 0-to-1 opportunity where you’ll have significant ownership over the product, architecture, LLM systems, and underlying data models while building solutions that are already being used by real enterprise customers. You’ll work closely with the founding team, customers, and go-to-market teams, giving you direct visibility into the problems you’re solving and the impact of your work. The engineering team is currently growing to 20 employees, so you’ll have the opportunity to make a meaningful impact on a company. This is a full-time on-site position in San Francisco, CA.

Job Responsibilities

• Architect and ship agentic workflows and RAG pipelines in production for external enterprise customers.
• Design the relational schemas and scalable pipelines the platform runs on.
• Own features and products outright, with full autonomy over driving the outcome.
• Collaborate with go-to-market and get on customer calls when it moves the product forward, no translation layer required.
• Turn what Fortune 50 accounts tell us into fast, continuous improvements to the platform.

Job Qualifications

• Built LLM systems end- to- end in production (e. g. , agentic workflows, RAG pipelines).
• BS in Computer Science or a related field.
• Relational database schema design and distributed systems fundamentals.
• 1 - 8 years of experience in full- stack software engineering, with focus on Python and LLM systems.
• Startup, founding, or 0- to- 1 ownership (small startup is accepted too).

Nice To Have Skills

• Experience with Next.js and React.

Job Benefits

• The chance to have a founding role.
• Highly competitive salary.
• Generous equity participation.
• Health, vision, and dental insurance.

RIGHT TO REPRESENT

By applying to this position, you acknowledge and agree to be represented by LYA Collective for this opportunity.

Skills: pipelines,python,data