Founding Engineer, RecruitmentTech

AI-native product · Global hiring market · Stealth / Pre-seed
Remote-first · India preferred for time-zone overlap · Full-time

We're a small founding team building something new in the global hiring market — an AI-native solution aimed at SMB and mid-market customers, currently in stealth.

The hiring industry today is stuck in an AI doom loop. Job seekers use AI to apply; companies use AI to filter. Applications have surged past 11,000 per minute on LinkedIn alone, and only 8% of candidates believe the systems screening them are fair. Most of the tools sold to fix this are making it worse.

We think the next generation of hiring software looks fundamentally different. We're building it.

The founding team brings together a leader with years in global HR solutions and SaaS/enterprise hiring, a product leader who has scaled global systems in e-commerce and testing, and a GTM engineer who has taken a product from $1M to $20M ARR in 18 months. We've shipped at scale before. We're starting over — quietly, deliberately — on a problem we've each lived from a different side.

About the role

You'll be our first engineer.

That phrase gets used loosely. We mean it literally — the first commit, the first architectural decision, the first deployment, the first hire after you. Every system that gets built later sits on top of what you build now.

This is a founding seat with founding equity. You'll work alongside the three of us on product, technical, and hiring decisions, and shape how engineering culture takes root in this company.

What you'll do

• Architect and build the core platform from line one — agents, retrieval, multi-tenant backend, data infrastructure, ranking and recommendation layers.
• Set the technical bar, the engineering culture, and the stack.
• Work directly with founders on product direction, customer conversations, and roadmap.
• Ship fast, iterate faster, in close loops with early design partners.
• Hire engineers two through five over the next 18 months, alongside the founding team.

What we're looking for

• 5+ years of engineering experience, with real production work on AI systems — agents, RAG, recommendation engines, or similar. Prototypes don't count. Shipped systems do.
• Strong backend fundamentals — Python, distributed systems, multi-tenant architecture.
• Comfort across the stack: data pipelines, vector or graph stores, LLM orchestration, frontend when needed.
• Has shipped 0-to-1 before, ideally at an early-stage startup.
• Strong opinions, low ego, high ownership. The appetite to own a system end-to-end and the judgment to know what not to build.

Bonus

• Background in HR tech, recruiting, or people-data systems.
• Experience with LangGraph, Temporal, pgvector, Neo4j, or similar.
• Open-source contributions or production AI side projects.
• Has been the first or second engineer at a previous startup.

How we work

We're staying small on purpose — six to ten people for the next 24 months, with one clear objective: hitting our first ambitious revenue milestone, measured in millions.

Walking the extra mile, ownership, and autonomy aren't slogans for us. They're the fabric of how we work from day one. We move fast, decide in close loops, and ship in production — not in pitch decks. We hire people who'd rather own a system end-to-end than maintain a feature inside someone else's vision.

*What you get
*

• Founding equity — meaningful, not symbolic.
• Full architectural ownership from day one.
• A seat at the table on every major decision — product, hiring, GTM.
• Direct customer exposure from week one.
• A small founding team that's been around the block enough to know what not to build.
• Competitive base salary, calibrated to founding-engineer market for the region.