Founding Engineer - Full Stack

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

Job summary

A tech startup specializing in LLMs is seeking a Founding Engineer to own end-to-end problem-solving from customer insights to infrastructure. The ideal candidate will be full-stack, comfortable with new engineering tools like React, Python, and AWS, and has a strong design sense. This role offers the chance to shape a new engineering team and push boundaries in the field of Brand Engineering. Startup experience or personal projects showcasing initiative are highly valued.

Qualifications

• Experience building agentic systems.
• Strong sense for product and design that lets you build things customers love.
• Prior startup experience or self-driven projects to demonstrate initiative.

Responsibilities

• Own problems end-to-end from insight to infrastructure.
• Shape a new engineering team and adapt best practices.
• Maintain a close feedback loop with customers and the executive team.

Skills

Full-stack development

Customer-facing UI

Adaptation to new tools

Product and design sense

Curiosity about LLMs

Education

1+ years of experience on engineering teams

Scientific research experience (bonus)

Tools

React

Python

Terraform

AWS

Job description

What is Unusual

Unusual helps brands understand how LLMs talk about them, and gives them tools to change their minds.

This is an immensely important and interesting technical challenge – our engineering team focuses on reverse engineering the sources, implicit biases, and reasoning patterns that guide model behavior, and builds products that use this understanding to help people regain control over how they are represented.

From a product perspective, we have a unique opportunity to define the new field of “Brand Engineering”: we can accurately measure LLM’s opinions of a brand, which enables us to quantify a brand’s performance relative to their peers along any dimension. By putting numbers to these previous intangibles, we can add an element of science to the art of brand; perhaps the final piece of a decades-long effort to bring math to marketing.

If you want to define a product category, push the boundary on a new field of research – applied interpretability, and make a positive impact by helping people control their own narrative rather than large AI companies, we’d love to talk.

About The Role

As a Founding Engineer, you’ll own problems end-to-end – from high level customer insight all the way to research and infrastructure. You’ll keep a close feedback loop with customers and the executive team, and ship fast.

In addition, you’ll help shape a new engineering team at the dawn of a new kind of software development. Vibecoding is the next paradigm, and as AI tooling improves, we’ll need to work together to regularly reinvent the best patterns and practices for working alongside agents on a team.

Who you are

• You are full-stack, comfortable working from customer-facing UI all the way down to infrastructure.
• You are eager to adopt and adapt to new engineering tooling, including AI-powered coding tools.
• You are an individual contributor by choice and want to stay close to the code.
• You have a strong sense for product and design that lets you build things customers love.
• You have prior startup experience or self-driven personal projects that demonstrate initiative.
• You are curious about how LLMs work and excited to build systems that probe and influence them.
• Bonus: You have scientific research experience.
• Bonus: You're comfortable talking to customers directly.

Technical requirements

• 1+ years of experience on engineering teams (3+ preferred)
• Comfortable with React, Python, Terraform, and AWS
• Experience building agentic systems

Who we are

We're backed by Y Combinator and the first investors in SpaceX, Uber, Stripe, Clay, and Notion. And our team has solved some of the most challenging problems in technology and go-to-market—ranging from building the first Starlink prototype at SpaceX to scaling startups into market leaders within the most competitive industries.

Our values

• Character comes first. We only work with people we deeply trust and respect. We think this makes work more fun, freeing, and effective.
• We try to remain down to earth and in touch with customers' real pains. Everyone at Unusual works in the customer service department.
• We do whatever it takes. When we know what we must do, we don't take shortcuts or shy away from huge ugly challenges.

About Us

Our cofounder and CEO Will Jack is a second-time founder who previously started Khosla-and-Greylock-backed Remedy Health. Will has been working in NLP research since 2014 (using attention mechanisms before the Transformer) and is ex-SpaceX, MIT. He was the first person to commercialize AI code generation in 2019 while working on HBO’s Silicon Valley. He gained international recognition as a teenager for building a homemade nuclear fusion reactor. Github

Our cofounder Keller Maloney has been building in AI applications since 2019, and he was Cum Laude in Econometrics from Princeton University and was a D1 All-American water polo Captain. Github

Our Head of GTM, Sarah Xu, is a repeat GTM builder with deep empathy for Heads of Growth and agencies. She drove 10X growth at Circle Medical (YC W17), built Ambience Healthcare’s GTM from pre-revenue (led to $350M raised by Oak HC/FT, Kleiner Perkins, OAI, a16z), and designed growth engines at Google for companies and agencies that scaled revenue 5–10X.