Founding Engineer / Builder

About the role

This role is for someone who can combine engineering excellence with strong product thinking and taste. That is why it is called Founding Builder rather than Founding Engineer. It is best for people who actually enjoy building products, not just building engineering systems.

You would be a core part of the founding team: owning product and engineering decisions, shipping new products and features, talking to the people who use them, and deciding what to do next.

Engagements run four to twelve weeks and ship in increments the client can use as they land. That means fast, opinionated building against messy real-world data and systems that were not designed for any of this. The market is constantly evolving and so are we. You should be comfortable trying lots of things with uncertain outcomes and failing fast.

Exceptional candidates will be considered for founding-level scope and equity.

What you'll work on

• Custom agents and copilots. Agents that understand a business well enough to do the work correctly, not just produce output that looks fine.
• Workflow automation inside existing systems. Building native to the CRM, ERP, or ticketing system the client already runs, with their permissions model intact and no forced migration.
• Self-improving systems. Teaching an agent to read its own outcome data, and building the evals that tell the client whether it still performs after we leave.
• Data readiness. Getting real, unclean, production data into a shape agents can work against.
• Everything else a founding engineer touches. The internal harnesses and tooling that make a small team move like a large one.

Requirements

• Strong technical background. You can go deep anywhere in the stack and you are fast.
• You've built and launched something real that people actually used. Company, side project, open source. We care that it shipped and that it got traction, not what it was attached to.
• You know how to design and architect AI agents. You have built agentic systems, hit their failure modes, and have opinions about what works.
• Strong at agentic engineering. Your own output is visibly agent-leveraged. This is how we operate and it is a large part of what we sell, so we especially value people who understand the intuitions behind it.
• Strong product and design sense. You can think clearly about what to build and why, and about what is not worth building.
• You want the 0 to 1. Early-stage operator energy: deep in the weeds, high tolerance for ambiguity, iterating fast.

Preferred experience

• TypeScript and Next.js fluency
• Integrating with enterprise systems: Salesforce, NetSuite, Zendesk, SAP and similar
• Early at a startup before

Stack

TypeScript by default: Node/Express, Postgres, Next.js/React and Tailwind. Claude Agent SDK for the agent layer. In practice we build where the client's business runs, so comfort dropping into an unfamiliar stack and shipping in it matters more than fluency in ours.

Interview process

If it makes sense, we move fast from intro call to offer within days.

1. Intro call to get to know you a bit better.
2. A technical interview where we whiteboard through some product and engineering problems.
3. Onsite: spend a day building something with us in SF.

About Slipway

Slipway takes the operation a company runs today and rebuilds the parts of it that should be running on AI. We scope it, we build it, we hand it over working.

Our clients are companies between 20 and 2,000 people with real revenue, real process debt, and no in-house AI team. Support queues, revenue ops, back-office finance, contract workflows. The work is already happening, it is just happening slowly and expensively, and nobody inside the building has the time or the context to fix it.

We are not a research lab and we do not sell seats. Every engagement opens with a named number on the client's P&L and closes with their team owning the system outright: documentation, evals they can rerun, trained operators, no lock-in.

If you've shipped something with real taste recently, send us the link.

[email protected]