Founding Engineer

Mesh; San Francisco, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Mesh is seeking a Founding Engineer to help build the governance layer for financial logic from the ground up. You will work directly with the founders to architect the platform, engage with customers, and ship systems that become the company’s foundation.

You'll own problems end-to-end, from initial conversations to production, in a small, high-ownership team. You’ll shape architecture, tooling, and product primitives in a fast-paced, AI-native environment.

Job description

About Mesh

Every company has operational systems that capture what happened across the business.

Every company has an ERP that records the financial outcome.

Between them sits something surprisingly fragile: the financial logic that determines how operational reality becomes financial truth.

Today, that logic lives in spreadsheets, approval chains, tribal knowledge, and the heads of experienced accountants.

Mesh is building the governance layer for financial logic. We ingest operational data, orchestrate AI and human workflows, apply company-specific accounting policies, and produce governed, explainable financial outputs that CFOs, controllers, auditors, and boards can trust.

We believe the governance layer for financial reasoning will become foundational infrastructure for every AI-native enterprise.

Why Mesh

Accounting is one of the last major enterprise workflows still held together by spreadsheets, not because the industry resists change, but because every business has thousands of edge cases that traditional software couldn't model.

Our founders have spent years building financial software alongside accounting teams.

Our moat isn't access to foundation models. It's the governance layer built on top: financial policy engines, workflow infrastructure, enterprise integrations, evaluation systems, audit trails, and years of accumulated customer knowledge.

The Role

We're looking for a Founding Engineer to help build Mesh from the ground up.

You'll work directly with the founders to architect the platform, talk to customers, design new product primitives, and ship systems that become the foundation of the company. You'll own problems end-to-end, from the first customer conversation to production.

We're intentionally building an unusually small team to solve an unusually difficult problem. We believe exceptional companies are built by exceptional builders, not large organizations.

What You'll Build

• Financial policy engines that translate accounting judgment into executable workflows.
• Agentic systems that gather evidence, coordinate stakeholders, and operate within governed approval boundaries.
• Workflow infrastructure connecting humans, AI, and enterprise systems.
• Spreadsheet interpretation and policy modeling that turns institutional knowledge into durable software.
• AI evaluation infrastructure for reliable, explainable production systems.
• Enterprise integrations and data pipelines across ERP, procurement, AP, HRIS, billing, and operational systems.
• Auditability and governance tooling that makes every financial decision explainable, reproducible, and trusted.

You’ll work across backend infrastructure, AI systems, developer tooling, and enterprise product design.

What You'll Bring

Customer obsession — You start with the customer, followed by the architecture. You enjoy understanding how people actually work before deciding how software should work.

First-principles thinking — You simplify complex systems by understanding their fundamental constraints rather than copying existing solutions.

Taste for simplicity — You enjoy turning messy workflows and complex domains into elegant abstractions.

End-to-end ownership — You move comfortably from customer conversations to product design, implementation, production, and iteration.

High agency — You investigate ambiguity, develop strong opinions, and move difficult problems forward.

Strong systems judgment — You know how to build reliable systems that balance correctness, speed, maintainability, and scale.

AI-native engineering — You use AI to dramatically increase your leverage while recognizing that great engineering comes from judgment, not generated code.

Love of difficult production problems — You enjoy debugging failures that span infrastructure, data, product logic, and human workflows.

We care far more about judgment, curiosity, and rate of learning than checking every box on a resume.

Nice to Have

• Experience building backend infrastructure, workflow engines, developer tools, or large-scale data systems.
• Experience with AI agents, evaluation systems, or human-in-the-loop products.
• Familiarity with enterprise software, financial systems, or accounting workflows.
• Curiosity for learning difficult domains and building products experts trust.

Our Stack

• Backend: Python, FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, PostgreSQL, Celery
• Frontend: React, TypeScript, Tailwind, Vite
• AI: LLM-powered agentic workflows (Anthropic, OpenAI)
• Infrastructure: AWS (ECS, RDS, S3, Lambda)

We value strong engineering fundamentals over attachment to any particular framework or language. While this is our current stack, we are looking for engineers who are stack-agnostic, learn quickly, and choose the right tools for the problem.

AI is embedded throughout both our product and our engineering workflow. We expect engineers to actively improve their own developer experience: automating repetitive work, building internal tools, creating reusable workflows, and using AI to increase the speed and quality of their output.

Why Join Now

Mesh is already powering live month-end close for enterprise customers. The product is real, the customers are real, and the most important technical decisions are still ahead of us.

The engineers who join now will shape the architecture, product, engineering culture, and long-term direction of the company.

We believe the governance layer for financial logic will become a foundational part of the modern enterprise stack.

We're building it with a remarkably small team.

Come build it with us.