Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer

We’re looking for one engineer who can build. You’ll work at the frontier of AI memory, context retrieval, and knowledge infrastructure, and own real surface area from day one. We’re two people with years of runway, so you’ll have enormous autonomy and you’ll ship constantly. And because we’re a tiny team, the role is broad: alongside building, you’ll pick up internal ops, customer relationships, and whatever moves the company that week. The heart of it is building.

What "build" means here

You have shipped something real: something with users, or something you use every day because you made it for yourself. You have gone from nothing to working software more than once.

You’re comfortable across the stack. Our codebase is Swift/SwiftUI (macOS app), Go (backend), and TypeScript (services). You do not need experience in all of these. You need to be the kind of person who picks up what they need.

You reach for AI tools instinctively (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) and you are faster because of it. If your first instinct under pressure is to stare at the code instead of handing it to an agent, this is not the right fit.

What you will work on

Core engineering

Cross-platform conversation sync across many AI providers, the hardest unsolved capture problem in the space

Search and retrieval that makes thousands of conversations queryable in milliseconds

Ontology and knowledge structuring: turning messy conversational material into trustworthy, typed knowledge

AI governance: team sharing, permissions, and policy. This is what turns Nessie from an individual tool into the context layer for a whole organization.

Agent-facing APIs (CLI, MCP) that let any AI tool reach accumulated human reasoning

Self-hosted and on-prem deployments, plus the security and compliance that come with them, as we move into larger and more regulated organizations

The intelligence layer that sits underneath every AI interaction

Agent-trace intelligence: extracting the first-class signal that lives only inside AI sessions and agent traces into a queryable layer for observability, eval, and self-improving agent workflows

A bit of everything

We keep this part intentionally broad. On a two-person team, beyond shipping product you'll help with internal ops, owning customer relationships, and the work that does not fit a job title. If you want to only write code and never touch anything else, this is not the role.

What you will NOT need

A specific degree or school

Prior startup experience

A perfect resume

Permission to try things

What you will need

The instinct to ship before it is perfect

The ability to work with extreme autonomy. We are two/three people. There is no manager. There is no spec. There is a problem and you figure out how to solve it.

Opinions about products you use. If you have never looked at an app and thought "this is wrong and here is how I would fix it," we are probably not a match.

Comfort with ambiguity. The product is evolving fast, and what you work on in week 1 may differ from week 4. That should excite you.

Logistics

San Francisco, in person.

$100K-150K salary, 0.5%-1.0% equity.

We’re open to sponsoring work authorization (including H-1B) for the right person.

How to apply

Show us something you built. A link to a project, a repo, a product, a tool. If you do not have something to show, build something this week and send it. We care about what you make, not what you say you can make.