Founding Software Engineer - Backend

San Francisco. Posted 11 days ago

The role

You will work with the CTO to design, prototype, and productionize AI-powered systems. You will lead architecture decisions and ship AI-driven features from model interaction to user-facing workflows.

What you will do

Rapidly prototype new concepts and features to validate ideas.
Ship AI-driven features end to end.
Set early engineering standards around testing, reliability, and code quality.
Translate ambiguous problem statements into concrete experiments, constraints, and working systems.
Lead architecture decisions and long-term technical direction with the CTO.
Collaborate with subject matter experts and customers from various industries.

Required qualifications

You care deeply about your work and the product.
You are comfortable with uncertainty and enjoy figuring out what to build before how to build it.
You have built complex agentic products or infrastructure.
You think in systems and feedback loops, not just features.
You can move fast and slow.
You want to become world-class at AI engineering.
You have a bias for action and a track record of working in fast-paced environments with urgency.

Nice to have

Strong testing intuition, including TDD and property-based testing.
Experience building and maintaining production-grade agentic or autonomous systems.
Exposure to legacy systems (especially mainframes or COBOL), compilers, program analysis techniques, or high-performance computing (HPC).
Familiarity with enterprise software constraints.

Benefits

Founding-team level equity
Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits for you and your family
Life Insurance benefits
Retirement Plan (e.g., 401K)
Monthly stipend to support your wellness and commute
Daily lunches/dinners and snacks in the office
Generous PTO and sick day policy
Relocation support as needed

Before you apply

Unable to sponsor new H1B employment visas
Can support H1B transfers and OPT

About the company

Hypercubic is building AI systems that understand, reason about, and rearchitect large-scale legacy applications running on mainframes and COBOL. They are a small, deeply technical team in San Francisco.