Founding Engineer

You'd be our second founding engineer. Huge surface area, real ownership, design-doc to production, working shoulder-to-shoulder with the founders across product, GTM, and ops.

withQ is the AI operations layer for hospitality: an agentic workforce that meets guests on any channel (voice, SMS, web chat, email, WhatsApp), in English or Spanish. Our agents don't just answer. They have empathy and personality, and they sell, already closing bookings and upsells at rates above many human call-center reps. We're live in production with real hotels and ski resorts.

We want a founder mentality: own major product and business outcomes, not tickets. The role is part founding engineer, part forward-deployed engineer, part customer success, until the CS agents we're building take that over. You'll help automate yourself out of the third hat.

You'll work on

Sub-second voice agents (SIP, warm payment transfers). Latency is a feature.
Agents that sell: booking and upsell flows, experiments that turn dialogue into revenue
Computer-use agents driving legacy hospitality tools with no API
PMS/POS/ticketing integrations (Opera Cloud, DerbySoft, Hapi). Make systems you don't control behave.
Synthetic NPS: AI grading every conversation into a weekly feedback loop
Agent-authored code across the SDLC, with evals and guardrails
24/7 reliability hotels never notice

You have

5+ years building and operating production backends; strong TypeScript
AI-native workflow: coding agents and computer-use tooling as your daily multiplier
LLMs in production (agents, tools, eval loops), not just demos
Strong system design. AI writes code; you bring taste and foresight.
Distributed-systems fluency: queues, idempotency, retries, state machines
Interest in (or scar tissue from) telephony: SIP, carriers, PBXs
High agency, low ego, fast

Bonus: voice/telephony depth, PMS/POS or travel tech, conversation/QA analytics, early-startup time, Spanish or French

Stack: TypeScript monorepo (NestJS, Drizzle, BullMQ) plus React 19/TanStack on AWS EKS, Aurora Postgres, Valkey, Istio. Multi-model (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini) via Azure Foundry/Vertex, Vercel AI SDK and Mastra, leading-edge voice stack (Vapi, Deepgram, ElevenLabs). We ship daily.

Perks: Competitive salary, equity, benefits. Hybrid SF (~3 days/week), direct founder access. Customers run ski lifts and beach resorts, so the best deals close on a chairlift or a sun lounger. Pack your skis and a swimsuit.