Job Details

Who is Recruiting from Scratch: Recruiting from Scratch is a talent firm that focuses on placing the best candidate for our clients. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across North America, South America, and Europe to help them hire.

Title of Role: Founding Engineer
Location: San Francisco, CA (On-site preferred, remote optional within the U.S.)
Company Stage of Funding: Pre-Series A (Backed by Tier-1 investors)
Office Type: On-site preferred / Remote considered
Salary: $250,000 - $330,000
Company Description
Our client is building one of the most ambitious platforms in AI infrastructure: a gamified digital replica of the internet to train and evaluate large-scale autonomous agents. Backed by top-tier investors including Index Ventures and AI Grant (Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross), they are already working with some of the most prominent AI labs in the world and have secured multiple seven-figure contracts-all with a team of fewer than five engineers.

The company is on track to exceed $20M in revenue this year, with practically infinite market demand and a product that is shaping the future of agent-based AI development. This is a rare opportunity to join a breakout team still in its earliest stages.
What You Will Do
As a Founding Engineer, you'll tackle one of the most technically novel problems in modern AI infrastructure: simulating and gamifying internet-scale behavior for AI agents.

You will:

• Design and implement distributed data pipelines to simulate and clone large portions of the web.
• Build and optimize systems for running AI agents across diverse digital environments with low latency and high throughput.
• Develop tooling and interfaces to analyze and score agent behavior at scale.
• Identify performance bottlenecks and drive architectural decisions to improve scalability and efficiency.
• Collaborate closely with world-class AI researchers to solve open-ended and unsolved challenges at the edge of agent training and simulation.
• Work autonomously across the stack, contributing to everything from infrastructure design to front-end UX.

This is a high-impact, high-autonomy role with massive upside. You will be building foundational infrastructure for the next generation of internet-native AI systems.
Ideal Background

• Demonstrated history of exceptional projects-independent work, side projects, open-source contributions, or startups.
• Capable across the full stack: from distributed infrastructure and APIs to interfaces and debugging tooling.
• Deep technical intuition around when and how to apply AI and automation, particularly around agent training and inference.
• Experience working in small, high-performance teams or being among the first 30 hires at a fast-growing startup.
• Proven track record of speed, creativity, and delivery in high-stakes environments.
• Strong grasp of performance profiling and optimization techniques in modern production environments.
• Based in (or willing to relocate to) San Francisco is preferred, but remote U.S. candidates are welcome.

Preferred

• Fluency in TypeScript and comfort working in a codebase that spans frontend, backend, and infrastructure layers.
• Experience with AI agents, reinforcement learning, or benchmark environments.
• Familiarity with distributed systems, event-driven architectures, or serverless pipelines.
• Prior experience at a talent-dense company or notable AI/infra startup.
• A strong product sense and eye for UI/UX, especially in developer tooling.

Compensation and Benefits

• Salary Range: $250,000 - $330,000
• Equity: Generous equity stake with massive upside at an early stage
• Work Setup: On-site in San Francisco (preferred), hybrid, or fully remote within the U.S.
• Visa Sponsorship: Not available
• Additional Benefits:
  • Fast-paced, mission-critical engineering environment with clear impact
  • Direct access to partnerships with leading AI labs
  • Once-in-a-generation chance to shape a foundational piece of AI infrastructure
  • Collaborative team that thrives on autonomy, creativity, and execution

This role is ideal for an ambitious, inventive engineer who thrives on tackling unsolved problems and wants to help build a multi-billion-dollar platform from the ground up. If you're excited by extreme ownership, deep technical challenge, and working directly with frontier AI labs, this is the place to do it.
Salary Range: $250,000-$330,000 base.