Founding Engineer

Who is Recruiting from Scratch:

Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers, software, and hardware talent at innovative companies. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across the United States to help them hire.

Title of Role: Founding Engineer

Location: San Francisco, CA (Presidio – On-site, 5 days/week)

Company Stage of Funding: Seed (~$10M raised)

Office Type: On-site

Salary: $180,000 – $280,000 + Competitive Equity

Visa: No visa sponsorship available

Company Description

Our client is an early-stage enterprise AI startup building intelligent automation systems for the insurance industry.

The company is transforming one of the largest and most operationally inefficient sectors globally by replacing manual, error-prone insurance workflows with AI-native systems.

Backed by Y Combinator with one of the largest recent insurtech seed rounds, the company has already secured a pilot with a top-10 U.S. insurance carrier that could convert into a significant seven-figure enterprise contract.

The founding team brings deep technical and domain expertise, including prior startup exits and experience scaling high-growth engineering organizations.

With only a few engineers on the team today, this is a rare opportunity to join as an early foundational technical hire and shape both product and engineering culture from day one.

What You Will Do

Build AI agents and core product features from scratch

Own full product modules end-to-end from discovery to production

Work directly with enterprise customers to deeply understand workflows

Design and iterate on evaluation systems for AI agent performance

Build systems that ingest and reason over unstructured enterprise data

Develop backend systems for scalable AI workflows

Prototype rapidly and ship production-grade solutions

Travel occasionally to customer sites for implementation and discovery

Partner directly with founders on product and technical direction

Help define engineering culture, architecture, and long-term technical strategy

Ideal Candidate Background

2–10 years of full-stack or backend engineering experience

Strong startup experience or evidence of exceptional ownership

Experience shipping production systems end-to-end

Strong product-minded engineering instincts

Comfortable working in ambiguous, customer-driven environments

Excited by AI-native engineering workflows

Preferred

Built production LLM or AI agent systems

Experience in regulated or data-intensive industries (insurance, fintech, healthcare, legaltech)

Strong TypeScript or backend systems experience

Experience designing eval systems for AI outputs

Experience with agentic engineering workflows

Strong customer-facing technical communication

Exceptional evidence of intensity / excellence (startup founding, competitive athletics, OSS, etc.)

Compensation and Benefits

Base salary: $180,000 – $280,000

Equity: Competitive early-stage equity

No visa sponsorship

Relocation support available within the U.S.

Direct founder collaboration

Meaningful ownership from day one

Clear path to future technical leadership

Why Join

This is a rare opportunity to join an AI-native startup attacking a massive legacy enterprise market at the exact moment the technology is ready for disruption.

You’ll work directly with enterprise customers, build production AI systems from scratch, and help define the technical foundation of a company positioned for rapid growth.

If you're excited by hard technical problems, direct product ownership, and operating as a true full-stack problem solver, this role offers exceptional upside and impact.