Founding Member of Technical Staff

Socket.dev; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Socket.dev is looking for a founding‑level engineer who will own end‑to‑end product work, from initial design to scalable implementation. You’ll ship across the stack using TypeScript, Next.js, React, Tailwind, tRPC, and Postgres, ensuring reliability and performance for massive usage.

You’ll collaborate across teams to improve core infra and developer experience. You will thrive in an environment that rewards initiative, high‑velocity delivery, and thoughtful tradeoffs.

Qualifications

• Experience shipping full-stack products from zero to one.
• Ability to design scalable, reliable systems for high volume usage.
• Strong ownership and end-to-end delivery mindset.

Responsibilities

• Own customer-facing experiences end to end for agents and developers.
• Build systems that ship fast while avoiding regressions.
• Prioritize work to deliver the 20% of features that unlock 80% of value.

Skills

TypeScript

Next.js

React

Tailwind

tRPC

Inngest/Temporal

MCP

plugins

Tools

Postgres

CLI

Job description

How we work

Everyone owns what they work on, end to end. As a founding engineer you're building the foundations of the company. The bar is simple: do everything within your power to get the job done, and then go find the things that aren't in your power yet and get those done too.

Every MTS at Glen must be comfortable with

Product Engineering
You've taken full-stack products from zero to one. You start from first principles on what the best experience would be and work backwards from there. Users will always ask for things, and you can tell the difference between a one-off request and the change that moves the product forward for everyone. You work across the stack and have the right amount of breadth to execute, measure and iterate end to end.

Infrastructure & Backend Performance
You know what's out there, you have opinions about what to use when, and you know when not to. You've built long-running durable complex workflows, things that have to survive retries and partial. We ingest every agent session, message, PR, ticket and call across every team we serve. The volume is massive, and we are responsible for ensuring not a single thing gets missed. You are the person who finds the extra 200ms.

Research & Pipeline Optimization
You know the literature and you're creative on top of it. We're trying to measure something that is very hard to measure: what context makes the user’s agent work better? You can design benchmarks that truly measure the thing, make the judgment calls that go into them, and turn the results into what actually works in the real world. A lot of what we are working towards is uncharted territory, so expect to do a lot of thinking.

Always Forward Deployed
You own the customer experience end to end. You have deep empathy for the people you deploy with, and you take responsibility for their outcome, not just your part of it. You close the loop with every other function: what you hear from customers turns into signal that improves the product, the infra and the research across the board.

_You build with agents and for agents and their developers & end users._

_You build the systems that let a team ship fast without breaking things._

_You have taste._

_You build trust with the people around you. You admit what you don't know._

_You know what to prioritize. 80% of the value comes from 20% of the work, and you can find that 20%._

Bonus points

• You've worked somewhere that handles enormous volume.
• You've worked in our stack: TypeScript, Next.js, React, Tailwind, tRPC, Postgres, Inngest/Temporal, MCP, CLI, plugins.
• You've been a founder.
• You’ve built for developers.
• You've been a real contributor to a large open-source project, or you have a serious side project.
• You've worked at an early-stage startup before.