Founding Engineer #1

San Francisco · Fort Mason · On-Site · Backed by Founder's Inc.
$80–120K + 1–3% equity

Cash is lean by design — equity is where this role pays like a founder seat. We're optimizing for ownership, not market cash.

Why this role
Hup is building the #1 vision-based assistant for the home and life — consumer hardware that actually sees and helps. Our Founder/CEO has built the entire product from day one. You're the first technical hire. You'll shape the stack, the culture, and eventually who we hire next.

What you'll own
Features end to end: devices in the field → vision models → backend → frontend. You'll work directly with customers, ship under ambiguity, and use AI coding agents aggressively every day.

First 30 / 90 days

30 days: Ship meaningful product surface in TypeScript; get comfortable with the device + vision path; sit with real users/homes
90 days: Lead at least one full feature across edge → backend → UI; own a production vision/ML piece; be the default person customers and the founder trust to close the loop
Must-haves

SF-based; on-site at Fort Mason
Proven ownership, you've built real things yourself and can drive work across domains
Strong TypeScript / full-stack production experience
Solid basic–intermediate ML (embeddings, practical model use, judgment in production)
Exceptional at commanding AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, etc.)
Comfort working closely with customers and shipping end-to-end under ambiguity
Ready to be engineer #1

Nice-to-haves

C++ firmware / embedded beyond hobby level
Python vision/ML or on-device inference experience
Prior consumer hardware or forward-deployed / edge work
Early-stage startup experience (especially founding or first eng hire)
Strong product taste for how something feels in someone's home
Stack (today)
TypeScript (primary) · C++ (firmware) · Python (vision models) · modern AI tooling throughout

In the answer box:

GitHub Link
X / Twitter (optional)

What's the most impressive thing you've built on your own outside of work? (side project, open source, hardware hack, indie product — not something your job assigned.) What was it, who used it, and what did you own end to end?

Got a link to it? Can be anything.

Why Hup?

Tell us about a time you worked directly with users or customers on something you built (can be the side project). How did feedback change what you shipped?

What's one way you interact with coding agents that others might think is crazy?

Stack fit: strongest today among TypeScript / C++ firmware / Python vision-ML

Equity is the upside ($80–120K + 1–3%). Are you optimizing for ownership over market cash right now?

Anything else you'd like to share?

How many R's are in the word Strawberry?