Founding Full-Stack Engineer - Takt

Pear VC; Palo Alto (CA); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity potential (0.5-1%)

Flexible hours

Opportunity to influence foundational systems

Job summary

An innovative technology company in Palo Alto seeks a Founding Full Stack Engineer to develop core systems that power modern factories. Candidates should expect to work closely with founders and possess significant ownership over projects and decisions. Ideal applicants have at least 2-3 years of experience, strong back-end coding skills, and cloud infrastructure abilities, particularly with Azure. This role offers competitive compensation and equity potential.

Qualifications

• 2-3 years minimum prior experience required.
• Experience shipping production AI/ML or LLM systems end-to-end is a plus.
• Strong sense of agency and ownership.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and deploy systems across the entire stack.
• Work directly with the founders to build core intelligence engine.
• Influence the earliest product, infrastructure, and architecture decisions.

Skills

Cloud infrastructure skills (Azure preferred)

Generalist coding skills (especially back-end)

Experience with data pipelines

Full stack production grade code deployment

Tools

SQL databases

Microsoft Business Central

SAP

Job description

About Takt

Our Vision: A world where factories think.

Takt is building the brains of factories.

Factories have spent the last decade digitizing: adding sensors, software, and dashboards everywhere.

Yet most factories aren’t meaningfully smarter. Data is fragmented across disconnected systems, locked in reports, and dependent on tribal knowledge living in people’s heads.

The hard problem isn’t collecting data, it’s turning it into institutional intelligence.

Takt is building the brains of factories. We’re closing the loop from data → information → insight → action by orchestrating AI agents with deep operational context across the entire manufacturing stack. These systems reason about what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what to do next, acting as a continuous thought partner to factory leadership across sales, operations, supply chain, and finance.

This is not a chatbot or another analytics layer. We’re pushing the frontier of AI reasoning and decision-making in real-world, high-stakes environments. Just as Tesla redefined the car as a software-first system, Takt is redefining manufacturing as a software-defined industry.

Funding

Takt is funded by Pear VC (backed Doordash, Gusto) and is part of the PearX accelerator program.

Website: www.taktconnect.com

Founders

Takt was founded by Adhitya Raghavan (CEO) and Will Zunker (CTO).

Adhitya is from a small village in South India and first learned about factories by working as an operator on his father’s shop floor. His journey through squash took him to Princeton (Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering), Harvard (MBA, Baker Scholar), and Bain. Now, he’s bringing, building Takt to solve the very pain he experienced firsthand in factories and aiming to put a dent in the $8 trillion of waste that occurs in manufacturing globally.

Will an MIT PhD has deep experience in optimizing manufacturing processes through physics-based modeling and AI, driven by a belief that advanced methods can fundamentally transform how things are made. Along the way, he built open-source tools and collaborated with engineers across diverse manufacturing sectors, learning firsthand the challenges of waste and inefficiency on the factory floor. Now, at Takt, he’s channeling that journey into building technology that helps factories run smarter, faster, and with less waste.

Core Cultural Values

1. Stupid enough to make our dreams a reality: We are dreamers who build a better world. We own our decisions. We have the irrational belief and hunger to work until our dreams are a reality

2. The last one standing: Every single person takes ownership of their work with a gritty resourcefulness and dares to fight for it with every ounce of their energy.

3. Insatiable curiosity: Its always day 1 and we are an empty cup, a dry sponge ready to learn. Approaching every action with humility and scientific rigor and adopting a Kaizen mindset.

4. The best F1 team in the stadium: We win together and lose together; every person plays a crucial role to win the race. We have high expectations, trust our teammates and create the environment for everyone to shine. In the path the victory, we celebrate every small professional and personal win cherishing the journey

Role

Founding Full Stack Engineer

• Location: San Francisco, in person 4 to 5 days a week. Open to candidates willing to relocate.

• Hours: 50 to 70 hours per week with space for personal interests

• Compensation: 120-180K

• Equity: To be discussed (0.5-1%)

• Prior experience: 2-3 years minimum

You will be the first engineering hire and will work directly with the founders to build the core intelligence engine that powers modern factories. You will help design, build, and deploy systems across the entire stack and influence the earliest product, infrastructure, and architecture decisions. This role is for someone who wants deep ownership and real long-term impact.

Core Technical Requirements

• Experience deploying and maintain full stack production grade code at scale to support 50-100 enterprise customers with minimal downtime

• Strong cloud infrastructure skills (Azure preferred).

• Deep experience with data pipelines, especially cleaning messy, inconsistent real-world data AI-native in approach to coding utilizing new-age tools (e.g. Claude Code) to develop with speed.

• Strong generalist coding skillset especially on the back-end side.

Nice to have

• Experience shipping production AI/ML or LLM systems end-to-end (not research prototypes).

• Comfortable owning LLM tool orchestration, chain design, agent delegation, prompt engineering, and evaluation methodology.

• Hands-on experience integrating with enterprise systems like ERP, MES, and other data historians (Microsoft Business Central/ SAP)

• Working knowledge of relational + SQL databases

• Familiarity with per missioning models, data governance, or SOC2/GDPR.

• Experience engaging with IT teams and meeting security requirements for enterprise customers.

Mindset & Work Style

• Strong sense of agency and ownership: comfortable making fast decisions and revising them.

• Shipping and moving quickly, makes practical choices, and delivers value to customers

• Willing to learn and can get things done, even if they don’t know it from the get-go

• Thrives with incomplete information

• Passion for the product: speaks their mind, contributes ideas, and pushes for the best solution

• Long-term commitment to the mission, we are building foundational systems, not short-lived features. This means putting in the hours consistently and also making harder short term decisions for long term benefits