Founding Software Engineer

fierlo; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 175,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading company is looking for a Founding Software Engineer to develop AI-driven infrastructure automation tools. You will play a crucial role in shaping the product, engaging with open-source communities, and contributing to core product features. Ideal candidates have a solid software engineering background, experience with IaC tools, and a passion for building innovative solutions in a dynamic startup environment.

Benefits

Health insurance

Free lunch in the office

0.5% - 2.0% equity

Qualifications

• 2–3+ years of industry experience, ideally in early-stage startups.
• Experience with infrastructure tooling like AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes.
• Active contributor or advocate for open-source.

Responsibilities

• Lead development across open-source products: backend services, frontend UIs, infrastructure, and CLIs.
• Own decisions about product features, like UI for open-source tools.
• Manage Terraform state for powerful use cases.

Skills

Use of IaC tools

Distributed systems

Building UIs

Building backends

Clean code

Open-source advocacy

Education

Computer science fundamentals

Tools

TypeScript

Go

AWS

Terraform

Kubernetes

Job description

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This range is provided by fierlo. Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience — talk with your recruiter to learn more.

Base pay range

$175,000.00/yr - $200,000.00/yr

Direct message the job poster from fierlo

Founding Software Engineer (Open Source Infrastructure Tools)

Our client are building the future of infrastructure automation — and looking for a founding engineer to help lead the charge.

Building AI for Infrastructure.

This is not a DevOps, SRE, or platform role — this is a product-focused software engineering role, centered on building developer tools for the infrastructure layer.

We are looking for a passionate software engineer who loves to build great things!

They are on a mission to create an intelligent DevOps agent:

• Smart enough for developers to never worry about infrastructure.
• Secure and reliable enough for infrastructure engineers to trust it.

They have already made waves:

• Built a widely adopted open-source runner for IaC.
• Co-founded OpenTofu, the open MPL fork of Terraform.

You will join a team of three founders with past experience at Amazon, Fitbit, and Palantir. They recently raised their seed round from Initialized Capital and a dream lineup of devtools angels, including Olivier Pomel, David Cramer, and others.

About You

• You’re excited to be the first engineering hire in a small, fast-moving team where you’ll have real ownership across the stack.
• You bring 2–3+ years of industry experience, ideally in early-stage startups. You’ve shipped real products and know how to move fast without breaking things.
• You’ve used IaC tools like Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, or Kubernetes—not necessarily as a DevOps engineer, but you’ve been close to the metal.
• You’re comfortable reasoning about distributed systems, and you enjoy building both delightful UIs and robust backends.
• You write clean, high-quality code quickly. We use TypeScript and Go today, that can change quickly, but we are tool-agnostic.
• You have a solid grounding in computer science fundamentals and math.
• Experience with infrastructure tooling — AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, Golang.
• Active contributor or advocate for open-source — we live and breathe it.
• You’ve worked on developer tools and love talking to users.

What You’ll Work On

You’ll lead development across their open-source products: backend services, frontend UIs, infrastructure, and CLIs. While their open-source tooling is the current focus, we expect the scope to evolve quickly as we build toward broader adoption.

Some problems you’ll tackle:

• Should an open-source TACO have a UI? What kind, and for whom? We’ve built three versions — help us get it right.
• How should we manage Terraform state? Today we support external state (S3, GCS, Azure), but owning state unlocks powerful use cases around drift detection, dependency management, and more.
• We currently run on GitHub Actions for compute — should we expand to managed runners or integrate with other CI/CD platforms and Kubernetes?

This space is still nascent.

They have built maybe 10% of what’s needed and need you to come and help build the remaining 90% of this exciting product.

Compensation

• 0.5% - 2.0% equity
• Health insurance
• Free lunch in the office
• Meet founders for 30-45 minutes each. The whole thing should fit in a 2-hour block.
• They will ask you a series of technical, product as well as totally random questions. No coding puzzles as they will have a look at your github for that.
• They will be interested to understand how you go about building software products and businesses.
• We will get back to you with a decision or offer in 24 hrs.

Seniority level

• Seniority level

  Mid-Senior level

Employment type

• Employment type

  Full-time

Job function

• Job function

  Information Technology

• Industries

  Software Development and IT System Custom Software Development

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Inferred from the description for this job

Medical insurance

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