Founding Engineer

VC-backed AI Startup (stealth)

MUST be excited about joining an early-stage, entrepreneurial environment (ship fast, test, iterate, do 0 —> 1, work directly with customers, high-impact on product)

OK joining a 3-member team and work directly with the Founder CEO

Excited about owning the technical build (want a high-ownership, high-impact role; not take directions from someone)

Prior production-grade experience with LLMs

Company background: What are we doing?

We are a VC-backed stealth startup that is reimagining how billions shop online — powered by multi-modal (text, voice, and video) AI agents. Today, once you land on a site, it is a “click-by-click scavenger hunt” with endless filters, a keyword search bar, unlimited scrolling, laborious evaluation, and little guidance.

We’re bringing Gen AI to consumer brands — from the world’s most iconic names to the new-age, challengers — helping them build what the future demands. As marketplaces eat margins and ad costs soar, brand-owned sales is a TOP priority.

For both retailers and shoppers, we are creating the new era of AI-native commerce.

About the Role:

1) Work at the Bleeding Edge of Generative AI

You’ll architect and ship multi-modal AI systems — that reason over AND generate text, voice, video, and image in real time.

You will tackle greenfield challenges in LLMs and data engineering, and co-create the future of AI-human interfaces.

2) Own the build and shape what comes next – even at your young age

You won’t be handed specs or get pigeonholed — you’ll shape what we build and how we build it alongside a scrappy team of engineers and designers.

If you are tired of being a cog or writing code without knowing what happens to it, this is the opportunity to get a front seat to real customers, users and impact.

3) Ambitious Work, Bold Vision: Rewire a $6 Trillion Industry

Your code will shape how consumers (you, your friends and million others) shop online — and bring disruptive technology to brands stuck in legacy systems. Cool tech, real users, and a chance to pull an entire industry out of the past.

4) Highly-credentialed Team, Investors & Advisors

We are an experienced team from Stanford, Meta & Google with prior experience in e-commerce.

We’re backed by US VCs with extensive experience in Vertical AI and B2B category leaders such as MongoDB, Atomic work etc. And advised by leaders from top luxury houses such as Estée Lauder, Shiseido & Gucci, and D2C tech entrepreneurs.

5) Critical role (#1 founding engineer in India) + advised by Gen AI experts

You’ll work directly with the Founder & CEO to build the core infrastructure, AI features and a delightful product. Leading Gen AI experts from Meta & Google and CTOs of top retailers would advise your work.

6) Fastest Career growth you can imagine

You’ll join early and grow fast — we expect you to grow from a hands-on engineer to a technical leader hiring your own team. You will ship features but also architect systems and eventually own a specific domain and set its technical strategy.

6) Above market pay & equity

We offer highly competitive salary and equity benefits. We have a very high bar — but if you are the right candidate, we will compensate handsomely.

7) Opportunity to Move to the US (or work remote)

We can sponsor visas to the US so that you get to be at the epicenter of the AI revolution in Silicon Valley – you don’t have to spend lakhs on a Master’s degree.

OR you can work remotely if you prefer that.

8) US culture — no micromanagement

No fluff, no gossip, no hierarchy — just shared ambition and velocity.

We work hard, ship fast and obsess over building a great product, fast. You bring ideas to the table — as long as they serve the customers and users, we implement them.

What type of candidate we are looking for:

Strong academic background

2-4 years of full-time experience

Degree in computer science or related technical field for a top engineering college: IITs, BITS, IIITs, NITs, NSIT, PEC and Amity.

Prior work experience

Big tech employee looking to jump into a high-ownership, entrepreneurial role; OR

Current founding engineers in high-growth startups; OR

Former / current Founders & CTOs

Non-negotiable profile fit

Track record of high ownership, autonomous execution, and willingness to work hard: Given a task, you figure out the best technical path to achieve it

Highly curious and loves staying on top of latest developments in AI

Experience building web apps from the ground up, emphasis on backend & infra

Our tech stack — Backend: Python, Typescript; LLMs: OpenAI, Gemini; Multi-modal AI APIs and tools: Heygen, Eleven Labs, Deepgram, LiveKit, Pipecat; Cloud platforms: Render / Azure

Familiarity with production-grade conversational AI systems

Experience with techniques to improve factuality, knowledge-based grounding (prompt engineering, RAG, etc.) and safety mechanisms.

Bonus technical requirements

Experience fine-tuning LLMs (SFT/DPO/etc.)

Experience with WebRTC / realtime audio/video applications

Other Role details (Team structure, Process, Compensation)

Responsibilities

Develop and enhance conversational capabilities for multi-modal AI agents

Analyse customer feedback, usage data, and emerging trends to continuously optimize the performance and personalization of AI agents.

Test, iterate, and deploy new features to ensure our solutions remain at the forefront of the industry.

Define eval sets and red teaming strategy to guarantee safety of LLM responses.

Work across the stack to go from idea to shipped product.

Team structure

— Direct report to Founder & CEO

— Work alongside a founding engineer, product designer and AI advisors

Logistics

— 4-6 hours of overlap per day

— Remote to begin with, can sponsor L1 visas

Evaluation process

— 1 fit interview with Founder Take-home work assignment Follow on technical interviews (1 or 2 depending on the need)

Other company details (Mission, Culture, Product)

Mission: Bring in the new era of AI-native commerce.

– Next-gen shopping experience for consumers, simplified, faster and hyper-personalized.

– Empower brands to thrive in the digital era with intelligent, AI-driven systems

Culture / Values:

– High-ownership, comfort with ambiguity and ability to come up with and implement latest tech developments

– We work hard so shoppers don’t have to

– Bias for execution, ship fast, learn faster

Product

– Our first product is an AI-native storefront that adds a “brain” to a retailer's storefront. The same storefront, but now intelligent and hyper-personalized for each visitor.