Founding Engineer

Build from zero. Ship fast. Help shape the company.

I'm building a stealth AI SaaS company in a large, commercially important B2B category.

We are at the very beginning.

No inherited architecture.

No legacy stack.

No giant product team.

No roadmap written by committee.

I'm looking for an exceptional Founding Engineer / first technical hire to work directly with me and turn an ambitious product thesis into something real.

This is for someone who has already experienced 0 to 1 product building and wants to do it again with meaningful ownership.

If the partnership develops exceptionally well, there is a natural path toward broader technical leadership and potentially CTO.

The person I am looking for

I care far less about years of experience than about one thing:

You have shipped.

You have taken software from an idea, prototype, or blank repository to a real product used by real people.

You may be:

• An early engineer at a 0 to 1 startup.

• A former technical founder.

• A key engineer who built and shipped one or more SaaS products.

• A highly product-minded engineer looking for their first true founding role.

What matters is that you know the difference between writing software and building a product.

You should be comfortable operating when the problem is ambiguous and the answer is not obvious.

What you will own

Initially, you will own a large part of the technical product end to end.

That means helping to:

• Define the product architecture.

• Build the first production version.

• Make pragmatic build-vs-buy decisions.

• Design backend systems and APIs.

• Build real-time and event-driven workflows.

• Integrate third-party platforms and APIs.

• Build AI-native product capabilities.

• Design contextual memory and intelligence layers.

• Build enough frontend to ship complete experiences.

• Own deployment, reliability, security, logging, and observability.

• Work directly with the founder to iterate on product decisions.

• Sit with early users and observe where the product succeeds or fails.

• Ship, learn, and improve rapidly.

Additional engineering resources can be brought in where needed.

But you should be capable of taking the system from concept to production without depending on a large team around you.

The technical profile

There is no rigid technology checklist.

However, you will probably be strong across many of these areas:

Full-stack product engineering

• Backend architecture
• APIs
• Databases and data modelling
• Authentication and permissions
• Cloud infrastructure
• Production deployment
• Monitoring and debugging

AI-native product development

• Modern LLM APIs
• Prompt and context architecture
• Structured outputs
• Tool use
• Retrieval and memory
• Agentic workflows
• Evaluation and reliability
• Managing latency, cost, and failure modes

Real-time systems

• Experience with some combination of:
• WebSockets
• Streaming APIs
• Event-driven systems
• Real-time data pipelines
• Audio and voice systems
• Speech-to-text
• Third-party communication platforms

Experience building AI copilots, voice products, meeting intelligence, or other real-time AI applications is highly relevant.

Frontend

You do not need to be a design specialist.

But you should be comfortable building enough modern frontend, React / TypeScript or equivalent, to take an idea all the way to a usable product.

You should be AI-native

This matters a lot.

I am not looking for someone building exactly the way they did three years ago.

You should actively use AI to multiply your own engineering output.

You may already be using tools such as:

• Claude Code
• Cursor
• Codex
• GitHub Copilot
• AI-assisted debugging
• AI-generated tests
• Rapid prototyping workflows

The particular tool does not matter.

The mindset does.

The question I care about is:

How much more can an exceptional engineer build today because AI has changed the development process

I want someone who is actively exploring that answer.

How we will work

This role is based in Bangalore.

During the initial build phase, I want us working together from the office approximately five days a week, with flexibility when required.

This is not about office attendance for its own sake.

At this stage, speed matters.

I want us to be able to:

• discuss an idea
• sketch it
• build it
• test it
• realize it is wrong
• change direction quickly

The purpose of working together physically is to create extremely short feedback loops between product, technology, and commercial thinking.

As the company evolves, the working model can evolve too.

This role is probably not for you if

You are looking for:

• A mature engineering organisation.
• A perfectly defined backlog.
• Ownership of only one layer of the stack.
• Months to make architecture decisions.
• A management-only role.
• A predictable environment with little ambiguity.
• Someone else to determine exactly what should be built.

There will be uncertainty.

There will be things we build and throw away.

There will be problems neither of us has solved before.

You should find that energising.

What I value

Ownership

You do not wait for someone else to fix the problem.

Product instinct

You care whether the thing being built is genuinely useful.

Speed

You know when to prototype and when something needs to be engineered properly.

Technical depth

You can reason from first principles rather than only assembling frameworks.

Curiosity

You learn unfamiliar APIs, models, systems, and technologies quickly.

Low ego

The best idea wins.

High standards

Fast does not mean careless.

Founder mentality

You naturally think about the company, not only the code assigned to you.

About the founder

You will work directly with a senior executive and industry leader with significant experience building and scaling businesses and teams.

The founder will focus heavily on:

• customer understanding
• product direction
• commercial strategy
• go-to-market
• company building

You will have significant influence over the technical product and engineering direction from the beginning.

This is intended to feel much closer to a founder-builder partnership than a conventional employee role.

Compensation

The package includes: Competitive cash + meaningful founding equity.

There is flexibility in how the package is structured.

For the right person, we are open to weighting the package more heavily toward equity in exchange for lower fixed compensation.

The goal is to find someone who wants genuine ownership and upside from what they build.

Specific cash and equity will depend on experience, capability, and appetite for risk.

Why this might be the right opportunity

Most engineering roles ask you to improve something that already exists.

This role gives you the opportunity to:

• Build the first product.
• Make foundational technical decisions.
• Work directly with the founder.
• Influence product strategy.
• Build using the newest generation of AI technology.
• Shape the engineering culture.
• Help build the future engineering team.
• Own meaningful equity if the company succeeds.

If you have built at zero before and miss that feeling, or you have been waiting for the right opportunity to do it, I would like to talk.

How to apply

Please do not send only a résumé.

Instead, tell me:

1. Something you personally built and shipped.
2. What part of it you owned.
3. The hardest technical problem you solved.
4. What broke in production and what you learned from it.
5. How AI has changed the way you build software.
6. Why you want to join something at this stage instead of a more established company.
7. Links to products, GitHub repositories, demos, technical write-ups, or startup projects are particularly useful.

The strongest signal is evidence that you know how to turn ambiguity into a working product.