Senior Software Engineer

String AI; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

Gym

Free meals at office

PTO 20 days

Job summary

String AI in New York City is seeking a founding engineer to join the Engineering team and own core infrastructure for autonomous data extraction from the web. You’ll work alongside the CTO on scalable systems that process thousands of requests per second and deliver structured data to enterprise customers.

Expected to ship across backend, ML, infra, and AI agents, with a focus on practical, end-to-end solutions.

Qualifications

• LLM application experience including RAG, agents, langchain, model evaluation and fine-tuning.
• Deep knowledge of antibot systems and reverse engineering, e.g., JavaScript deobfuscation or analysis in isolated environments.

Responsibilities

• Develop autonomous agents for solving real-world information extraction problems.
• Design our full-stack, self-serve application to be usable by non-technical users.
• Maintain and scale backend architecture/services for high request throughput and data volume.
• Contribute across the stack and help with website updates and infrastructure as code.

Skills

LLM application experience

Antibot / reverse engineering

Job description

Founding Engineer @ String

Status: Hiring

Business Unit: Engineering

Compensation: 75th+ percentile for geo and experience + market leading equity

Reports To: CTO

Location: NYC (In Person)

Overview

Hey this is Rohit (CEO/co-founder) writing this. I find most JDs to be quite impersonal and bland. We do things a bit differently here at String. So to start off, I appreciate you for taking the time to read this and for considering us.

We're building the most comprehensive platform to collect and structure data from the web.

Customers ranging from the world's largest hedge funds to seed-stage startups use String to pull 50M+ rows of structured web data per week (that's literally 50+ rows every second).

We're generating 7 figures in ARR and are growing double digit % MoM. We have found initial PMF and are now building our delivery team to accelerate growth. We've done everything so far with a lean team of < 10 people and we recently raised a seed round (unannounced) from leading VCs and angels in our space (Auren Hoffman, Charlie Songhurst, and many more).

We are looking for the right person to join us on this exciting journey! If you love solving tough technical problems, thrive in fast-paced environments, and enjoy working across the stack, we would love to meet you!

What do we do

Today any business that wants to collect web data has to jump through many hoops:

• Build infrastructure to send thousands of requests to websites
• Build technology to avoid getting detected as a bot (very hard to do at scale)
• Code individual scripts for every website they want to scrape
• Fix all those scripts as websites change, and
• Ensure consistent data quality across runs

We solve all of these problems for them so that they never have to worry about scraping. Thus, we 1) significantly improve their end products driving millions in revenue and 2) save them hundreds of thousands of dollars in engineering costs.

Building this would have been impossible before the AI revolution. We have a unique opportunity to build the first platform where anyone can collect data across any website with just a prompt. And we're excited to be at the forefront of solving this problem for our customers.

Who We're Looking For

Reach out even if the below isn't a match you, we want great people with any background!

• 5+ YOE shipping ??, or equivalent skill :).
• You've launched meaningful products in small teams or 0?1 environments.
• You want to work across the stack (backend, ML, infra, AI agents, etc).
• You want to build in-person, side-by-side with a tight-knit team.
• You're excited by the speed of early-stage startups and bias towards action.

Why Join Us

Before the AI revolution, building an end to end web scraping platform would have been impossible because every website is structured differently. We have a unique opportunity to build the first platform where a user can structure data across any website with just a prompt. We are at the frontier of AI based web scraping and are tackling a real pain point for our customers.

As a founding engineer, you will work alongside our CTO (Logan) and own large pieces of our core infrastructure for extracting, analyzing, and visualizing data from the web. The software you build will be used by thousands of enterprise customers to structure web data on a daily basis.

In this role, we'll ask you to:

• Develop autonomous agents for solving real-world information extraction problems: Yes it's a buzzword. But enterprises are full of dinosaurs who are doing things the same way they did 5 years ago and we're eating their lunch. We use agents because it's the best way to do what we do; there are a lot of weird webpages out there and you need an adaptive system to deal with this.
• Design our full-stack, self-serve application: Most of our users are non technical. We have to make the complex simple and assume reasonable defaults for them. This means having user empathy and the ability to quickly turn that empathy into a useful design. Any experience shipping 0-1 should translate here, ergonomic design is important for technical and non-technical users both.
• Maintain and scale our backend architecture/services: A large part of the value we bring to our customers is the scale of our extraction engine - we're processing thousands of requests per second and pulling 10s of millions of rows of data daily. The sexy parts of the system don't work without this engine humming. A good intuition for the design tradeoffs and breaking points of large scale distributed systems will help here.
• Anything else we need! We're a small team so anything from website updates, writing infrastructure as code etc. will be on the table!

Skills that are a good fit

• LLM application experience (RAG, agents, langchain, model evaluation, fine-tuning etc.). We apply what we need to make things work.
• Deep domain knowledge in antibot systems/reverse engineering. Talk to us if you've deobfuscated javascript, patched leaks in a browser or ran js in an isolated VM.

The Founders

Logan (CTO): Leading engineering and has extensive web scraping & AI experience. Ships like a 10 person engineering team (Rohit writing this, so I'm bragging for him). Previously worked as the founding engineer at Nourish (YC W21) and as a software engineer at C3 AI. Has arbitraged Polymarket, frontran ICOs & Coinbase listing, and wrote a chess analytics engine. TLDR has spedrun the full tech bro starter pack.

Rohit (CEO): Leading GTM and has signed up dozens of enterprises including 6 of the 10 largest hedge funds while spending most of his time coding. Previously worked as a consultant at Bain and cofounded two startups in college, one of them with Logan called CampusOven. Knows the mind of both the tech and finance bro.

4 Engineers: Engineers have all spent their entire engineering careers in the intersection of scraping (reverse engineering antibots, JS deobfuscation etc) and AI (building harnesses, fine-tuning models etc).

3 GTM: 1 Account Executive, 1 Chief of Staff, and 1 FDE who run through walls to push revenue forward and deliver value to our customers

Values

A good way to see if working with us would be a good fit would be to read through our team values. If you get excited from reading these, it's likely a good fit and vice versa.

Compensation

We're building an exceptional team and so want to be generous on compensation. Our philosophy is that base compensation is for living expenses and equity is for upside. We want you to be able to give your all and benefit proportionately from your contributions, without worrying about living expenses.

So our compensation structure is a base salary competitive with other seed stage startups (75th percentile salary for the level) and generous equity relative to other startups. We know that part of the excitement of joining a startup is the upside and to feel like an owner - that's why we left our corporate jobs.

More benefits:

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Gym
• Free breakfast, lunch & dinner at the office
• 20 days PTO per year
• Annual international offiste (and additional travel)
• All AI tooling comped (claude max, cursor, codex, copilot, whatever you need)

Interview Process

Initial conversation with Rohit (CEO) or Logan (CTO) - 20 minutes

Systems Design with Tufayl (Engineer #1) - 50 minutes

Product design with Logan (CTO) - 50 minutes

Final round - depends on availability/schedule but options include virtual/in-person onsite, take home, work trial etc.

FAQs

We answer some more questions (team values, product vision, how we think about raising, etc.) in this FAQ document, take a look!