Founding Engineer

Forestwalk is hiring a Founding Engineer to help teams build better AI products, faster.

What is Forestwalk?

We’re an early-stage product venture building a SaaS platform that helps AI engineers test their features. We’re two technical co-founders (Allen Pike and Jenn Cooper) that are rapidly building, testing, and plotting our path. We’ve proven an acute market need, and are now building a delightful solution.

Things are early! Right now, our hypothesis is that we can turn our current prototype into a winning product in the AI evals space – that is, build the best way for developers to validate and iterate their LLM-powered features. We’ve validated our work with over 100 interviews with companies like Superhuman, The Browser Company, and Khan Academy, and we’re now working to sign our first pilot customer.

Importantly, we’re building a venture-scale business: success means eventually earning hundreds of thousands of paid users.

Who are we hiring?

A Founding Engineer is a big-deal hire. We're going to take our time to find the right fit, since they're going to have a huge impact on the company and our path.

Currently we think of our values like this:

• Stay curious – Building from 0 to 1 is always an experiment. We’re energized by wondering, experimenting, and finding out.
• Build remarkable experiences – We create things that are not just useful, but also beautiful and fast. We make things worthy of our customers’ time and attention.
• Care personally – Software is about people. Compassion for others fuels great software and builds great teams.
• Move fast – Speed isn’t just about work completed. Building a great startup requires testing assumptions efficiently, changing our minds often, and keeping the right things simple.

We’re going to hire somebody that vibes with these values, but also pushes us to refine them.

Oh, and you also need to be able to ship code! You’ll have helped a SaaS startup scale beyond thousands of users, so you can help us make good choices as we do the same.

What’s the tech stack?

Doing something totally new is hard. Given that, we lean towards well-understood, pragmatic tech. So far that’s been TypeScript (with Remix, React, Tailwind, and Prisma) on top of Postgres and Redis, plus of course various LLM providers like OpenAI and Anthropic. We expect a Founding Engineer to help inform and evolve our tech choices as we build out and scale up.

What are the terms?

We’re looking for somebody who can join us full time, with 2-3 days a week in-person in Gastown. We’ve (quietly) raised a pre-seed, so we could make this hire as a full-time employee, maybe with a salary in the $130-165k range plus some equity depending on experience. That said, if you’d be up for starting with a 3-month trial contract, that could be a great way to test mutual fit.

How do I apply?

With your application, include three things:

• A link or PDF resume (LinkedIn is fine)
• Whether or not you’re up for working in person 2-3 days/week downtown Vancouver
• What made you curious about this role in particular?