Founding Engineer / Builder

Gooseworks; California (MO); On-site; USD 180,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity for founding

Job summary

Gooseworks is building self-improving AI agents that power growth for consumer brands. This founding-level role combines engineering excellence with strong product thinking, requiring hands-on building and strategic decision-making.

You will own product and engineering direction, ship features, and interact with users to shape the company’s trajectory. We're a YC-backed, San Francisco-based startup scaling early traction.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated ability to ship real products with traction.
• Deep engineering skills across the stack and AI agent systems.
• Strong product intuition and design sensibility.

Responsibilities

• Own product and engineering decisions as part of the founding team.
• Ship new products and features and talk to users.
• Decide what to build next and iterate quickly in uncertainty.
• Contribute to app, pipelines, and internal agent harnesses.

Skills

Strong technical background

Built & launched real product

AI agent design & architecture

Agentic engineering understanding

Product & design sense

0→1 early-stage operator energy

Tools

TypeScript

Next.js

Express

Prisma

Postgres

Claude Agent SDK

Trigger.dev

Job description

Note: This role is for someone who can combine engineering excellence with strong product thinking and taste. That’s why I’ve called it Founding Builder. The role is best for those who actually enjoy building products, not just building engineering systems.

About Gooseworks

Distribution is the hardest problem every company has. Not building the product — getting it in front of people, over and over, in a way that works. Today that means an army of humans making creative, testing it, reading the numbers, and doing it again next week. It doesn't scale, and it's the single biggest tax on every consumer brand in the world.

We think that changes. The billion-dollar companies of the next decade won't scale linearly with headcount — they'll be run by fleets of AI agents, and the org chart will look more like an architecture diagram than a hierarchy.

Gooseworks builds self-improving AI agents that run growth for consumer brands — ads, UGC, organic — end to end.

Very early - this is just a few months old, but seeing very strong pull:

• 200+ paying users
• 30,000+ ad creatives generated by our users in the last 2 months

We're a YC company based in San Francisco, and we run the company on agent harnesses ourselves — not as a demo, as the actual way the work gets done.

About the Team

We’re a small team that previously built Athina AI, an LLM observability & evaluation platform that was used by companies like Perplexity, You, Doximity, Meesho, and several other public companies.

Now we’re building Gooseworks to solve a much more exciting problem.

Goose is new, just a few months old.

In the last few months itself, we’ve:

• built and shipped a product with paying customers
• attracted thousands of signups and over 200 paying customers
• built a skill library with over 1.1k stars that’s been getting some real traction and usage.
• grown a subreddit to 50k monthly visitors and over 4,000 community members
• went viral on X a bunch of times
• created a harness to teach our agent to make videos with AI (see examples here)

A huge part of this was done by Goose, our AI coworker.

Now we’re scaling this for our customers.

About the role

You'd be a core part of the founding team. That means owning product and engineering decisions, shipping new products and features, talking to users, and deciding what to do next.

The market is constantly evolving and so are we. You should be comfortable trying lots of things with uncertain outcomes and failing fast.

Exceptional candidates will be considered for founding-level scope and equity.

What you'll work on

• Creative generation agents — agents that understand a brand well enough to make assets that actually perform for the brand, not just assets that look fine.
• Multi-channel distribution architecture — scaling creative across paid and organic channels, each with their own nuances.
• Self-improving generation — teaching an agent to read its own ad performance data and get better at the next batch.

Plus everything else a founding engineer touches: the app itself, the pipelines behind it, the internal harnesses that make four people move like twenty.

We're looking for

• Strong technical background. You can go deep anywhere in the stack and you're fast.
• You've built and launched something real that people actually used. Company, side project, open source — we care that it shipped and that it got traction, not what it was attached to.
• You know how to design and architect AI agents. You've built agentic systems, hit their failure modes, and have opinions about what works.
• Strong at agentic engineering. Your own output is visibly agent-leveraged. This is how our whole company operates, so we especially value people who understand the intuitions behind agentic engineering well.
• Strong product and design sense. You can think clearly about what to build and why / why not. Strong design sense / taste is also highly valued.
• You want the 0 → 1. Early-stage operator energy: deep in the weeds, high tolerance for ambiguity, iterating fast toward PMF.

Nice to have but not required: TypeScript/Next.js fluency, motion or video skills, and having been early at a startup before.

Stack

TypeScript everywhere. Express + Prisma + Postgres on the backend, Next.js / React + Tailwind on the frontend, Claude Agent SDK, Trigger.dev for the agent layer.

Location

San Francisco, in person strongly preferred.

Only exceptional candidates will be considered for remote positions.