Founding Member of Technical Staff

Justinian (YC S26); San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 100,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Meaningful founding-level equity

Competitive salary and benefits

PTO and team activities

Job summary

Justinian (YC S26) in San Francisco is hiring its founding Members of Technical Staff to develop AI agents crucial for processing complex governmental data. You will work closely with founders and policy teams, taking ownership from day one.

The ideal candidate will have solid engineering experience with a focus on full-stack development and applied AI/ML. This position requires a presence in the SF office 5–6 days a week, with opportunities for growth and meaningful equity.

Qualifications

• Solid engineering experience in full-stack product work or applied AI/ML.
• Experience building and shipping LLM-powered products and agents.
• Comfort with modern AI stack and capability to improve quality.

Responsibilities

• Build and own the AI agents from prototype to production.
• Ship tools that enhance productivity for policy staff.
• Design eval frameworks for agent output quality.

Skills

Full-stack product work

Applied AI/ML

Building agent workflows

Qualitative assessment design

Tools

Claude

Code

Codex

Cursor

Job description

About the Role

We're hiring our founding Members of Technical Staff - the engineers who build the AI agents at the heart of everything we do. You'll sit close to founders, government officials, and to the people who depend on your work every day, and you'll have real ownership from day one.

What We're Building

Government runs on an enormous, constantly‑changing pile of unstructured data—bills, rules, dockets, agency filings, and comment periods spread across Congress, federal agencies, and 50 states. We're building agents that read all of it and turn it into action for our clients. Specifically, that means:

• Agents that ingest legislation and regulations, reason over them, and produce real work product—memos, alerts, strategy, and proposals—reliably enough that our team stakes client relationships on it
• Retrieval and data pipelines that keep those agents fed with accurate, up‑to‑date information from messy, inconsistent government sources
• Eval frameworks that measure whether an agent's output is actually correct and useful
• The product surfaces our team works in all day—drafting tools, monitoring dashboards, and alerting
• Over time, the shared intelligence layer that sits underneath the entire firm

What You'll Do

• Build and own the AI agents our team relies on—from prototype to production
• Treat our policy staff as your users: ship the tools they depend on, and make them faster and sharper
• Build the retrieval and data pipelines that feed our agents accurate legislative and regulatory information
• Design eval frameworks to measure and steadily improve the quality of what our agents produce
• Work closely with our non‑technical team—tight collaboration between our technical and non‑technical people is how the agents get good
• Help build the technical playbook as we grow

What We're Looking For

• Solid engineering experience: full‑stack product work, applied AI/ML, or a closely related field
• You have built and shipped real LLM‑powered products and agents
• You are comfortable with the modern AI stack—building agent workflows, wiring up retrieval, and writing evals to keep quality honest
• High agency and comfort with ambiguity—you figure things out and drive them to completion
• Tokenmaxxer: if you are not a power user of Claude, Code, Codex, or Cursor, this is not for you
• Bonus: genuine curiosity about government, policy, or regulated industries. You don't need a Hill background, but you should be excited to learn the domain

Logistics

• In‑person, 5–6 days a week in SF, with occasional travel
• Meaningful founding‑level equity, plus competitive salary, benefits, and PTO. Compensation will grow rapidly with performance
• Fun: we like traveling, grabbing food, and frolicking around SF / DC together