Senior Founding Engineer

Inventure; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Inventure, a San Francisco-based AI-native startup, seeks a senior engineer to design the core systems from a blank page. You will own the durable-execution platform that runs fleets of agents, enabling real-time order placement, price negotiation, and secure movement of money and inventory.

You will define data foundations for entity resolution, SKU substitutions, pricing discovery, and the full PO lifecycle, while actively coding in Python/TypeScript and shaping the architecture.

Qualifications

• Designed complex distributed systems in production from scratch.
• 5-15 years of hands-on backend engineering experience.
• Proficient in Python or TypeScript/Node; strong systems knowledge.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build durable-execution platform for agent fleets.
• Design data and service foundations for entity resolution over millions of SKUs and purchase-order lifecycle.
• Make foundational technical decisions from storage to service boundaries and write substantial code.
• Set engineering standards and mentor the early team as it grows.
• Interface with buyers and suppliers to ensure system fit with industry needs.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend engineering

Python

TypeScript/Node

Event-driven architecture

Temporal

Code ownership

On-call readiness

Tools

Temporal

Python

TypeScript/Node

Job description

We've partnered with an AI-native startup rebuilding how one of the world's largest and least-digitised industries runs: wholesale distribution. They're building an AI-powered distributor that uses LLMs to buy and sell inventory for real, replacing the email, PDFs and tribal knowledge the industry still runs on. They've just closed a $20M inception round led by Kleiner Perkins. The founder has done this before: his previous supply-chain software company grew to 320+ customers transacting around $2 billion a month in inventory, and those customers alone were less than one percent of the market. This is the far more ambitious next step.

This seat is for a senior engineer who wants to design the core systems of a company from a blank page. The agents here don't just answer questions. They place orders, negotiate prices and move real money and inventory, so the platform underneath them has to be correct, durable and observable at scale. You'll design it, build it and own it.

The Role

• Architect and build the durable-execution platform that runs fleets of agents: long-running workflows, retries, idempotency, state, failure recovery and observability across distributed services.


• Design the data and service foundations for entity resolution over millions of messy SKUs, product substitution and search, pricing discovery and the full purchase-order lifecycle.


• Make the foundational technical decisions, from storage and OLAP to service boundaries, and write a lot of the code yourself.


• Set engineering standards and mentor the early team as it grows.


• Speak with buyers and suppliers when it matters, so the systems you build fit how the industry really works.

About You

• You've designed complex distributed systems from scratch and owned them in production, as the architect from day one, not by extending or optimising someone else's design.


• Roughly 5-15 years of engineering experience, and you're still hands-on, writing code most weeks. This is an individual contributor seat, so it won't suit someone who has moved into management.


• A generalist backend and systems engineer. Backgrounds mainly in forward deployed, solutions, data-pipeline, ML or product management roles, or in IT services, consultancies or contract placements, are unlikely to fit.


• Comfortable in Python, TypeScript or Node. Experience with durable execution or workflow engines (such as Temporal), event-driven systems or large-scale data is a strong plus.


• You want to build from zero at a seed-stage company, with the pace, ownership and on-call that come with it.


• Personable enough to hop on a call with a customer.


• Bonus: time at a strong engineering company or top AI lab (think Stripe, Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, Databricks, Temporal, Confluent, OpenAI, Anthropic), or an early or founding role at a well-funded startup with real customers.

Practicalities

On site in San Francisco five days a week. Relocation is supported, and the company is open to visa transfers and new sponsorship, including H-1B and TN.

The process is a short chat with the Head of Engineering, a 60-minute live coding round with no AI tools, then a four-hour onsite covering system design, a product case study and a deep dive into a system you've designed. They move fast!