Founding Engineer

Our client is building AI agents for the food manufacturing ecosystem — a ~$750B industry still heavily reliant on email, fragmented software, and manual processes.

They believe AI agents will transform knowledge work over the next few years and are earning trust with executives at leading U.S. food manufacturing businesses by deeply understanding industry-specific workflows and building agents that drive revenue and reduce direct costs.

Examples of problems they’re solving include:

• Identifying potential sales opportunities using web scraping and semantic analysis

• Building RAG systems to make manufacturer catalogs instantly searchable and usable

• Automating end-to-end compliance workflows by ingesting emails, identifying required documents, and completing them using AI agents

• And much more

The founding team brings 10+ years of experience in the food industry combined with multiple successful tech startups. They are backed by $1.8M in initial funding from top-tier venture and angel investors across food and technology.

About the Role – Founding Engineer

As a Founding Engineer, you will be involved in nearly every major technical decision the company makes. You’ll work directly with the founders across a wide range of problems and have true ownership from day one.

On any given week, you may:

• Build backend systems that ingest and process hundreds of PDFs from customer ERPs and CRMs

• Develop AI agents that auto-complete complex, multi-page compliance documents

• Ship across frontend, backend, infrastructure, and AI systems

This is a hands-on, zero-to-one environment. If you enjoy operating in ambiguity, moving quickly, and solving real-world operational problems with AI, this will feel like home.

What They’re Looking For

Builder mentality

You’ve shipped products used by real customers — at a startup, company, or your own project. You can articulate what you built, your tradeoffs, and what you’d improve.

Owner from day zero

You don’t wait for perfect requirements. You identify gaps, propose solutions, and execute.

Bias to action

You prefer shipping at 80% and iterating versus over-optimizing too early. You understand which decisions are reversible and which are foundational.

Pragmatic engineer

They intentionally use proven, reliable technologies. This is not an environment for ideological debates over frameworks — it’s about picking the right tool and delivering results.

They care far more about what you’ve built and how you think than where you went to school or how many years of experience you have.

Current Tech Stack (Evolving)

These are directional, not rigid requirements:

• Kotlin + Spring Boot

• React & Next.js

• Postgres

• GCP + Terraform

• Gemini + Anthropic

Budget for the coding agent of your choice