Founding Engineer

If you’re a driven person then you’ve probably read hundreds of job descriptions and calls-to-action. Most are boring, some are corny, and others try way too hard. Our goal with this one is to be honest, and straightforward. We mean every word – if they resonate with you, we want to chat.

Food brings people together. It’s one of the few things that can bring joy every single day — a dinner with friends lifts you up, a great breakfast can get you out of bed feeling amped.

Today, good food is expensive. Affordable food is bad. Delicious food is unhealthy.

Why? Skill issue.

Our vision
We believe everyone can have access to food they love, cooked in a way that’s healthy, at a price they can afford. AI has made this possible for the first time. Pathway exists to build the brain of the restaurant industry — a single system that knows what people want to eat, and how to deliver it at scale while keeping prices low and costs even lower.

How we’ll get there
We’re building AI agents that can run restaurants end-to-end: procurement, staffing, marketing, pricing, accounting, menu management. Everything short of cooking and serving the food itself.
Our goal is to take the guesswork out of operations and empower owners to run fully optimized businesses and bring their restaurant’s vision to life.

The team
We’re passionate about both tech and restaurants, which means we naturally jump in to unload crates in a customer’s walk-in freezer one day and design robust agentic systems the next.
We’re backed by Khosla Ventures - the earliest believers in OpenAI, DoorDash, Square, and Ramp.
It doesn’t take convincing to join a mission like this one: you either read the above and thought “hell yeah, how did I not find this sooner?” or you didn’t. That’s why we don’t believe in recruiting a team, only in finding team members we haven’t yet met.

Pathway could be a fit if you…

• Think independently, not shaped by Twitter hype.
• Put product and outcomes first.
• Don’t put anyone on a pedestal.
• Have seriously considered starting a company.
• Operate with professionalism and seriousness akin to a professional athlete.
• Ferocious learner - you say yes to things even if you don’t know how to do it -> You figure out how to do it -> You get it done
• You can laugh at yourself.

Skills

• Ability to deeply understand customer needs and work backwards to design systems - You should thrive at thinking deeply at all levels of abstraction.
• Strong at designing and building APIs and databases.
• Can design clean, intuitive APIs that are easy to use and extend.
• Experience modeling data and designing schemas that scale.
• Know how to balance trade-offs between performance, reliability, and simplicity.
• Intuition for how to build AI agents.
• Know what LLMs can and can’t do.
• Understand common failure modes of agents and how to mitigate them.
• Experience building comprehensive evals for agents.
• Able to push past “LLMs = non-deterministic” and get models to do what’s required.
• Comfortable building frontend components when needed. Able to design and implement clean, usable UIs without relying on a designer.