Founding Full-Stack Engineer

About this role

Founding Full-Stack Engineer
On-site · Engineering, Product & Tech · Full time San Francisco, California, United States
Our client is a stealth, seed-stage startup building an AI-powered wearable platform for industrial field technicians - running a real-time computer-vision and agentic AI system directly on smart-glasses hardware, live today with major data-center, energy, and industrial customers across multiple countries. Backed by a $5M seed round and founded by researchers from Harvard/NASA (computer vision, published at NeurIPS and ICCV) and MIT (machine learning, ex-quant researcher).
The bet: computer vision and agentic vision-language models (VLMs) grounded in real integrations with legacy enterprise systems (ServiceNow, SAP, Salesforce) — not another LLM wrapper. The industrial data this generates is also laying the groundwork for robotics automation down the line.
As Founding Full-Stack Engineer, you'll own the product layer end-to-end: the real-time video/data pipeline connecting wearable hardware to the AI core under tight latency budgets and unreliable connectivity, the backend APIs and data layer, and the frontend/mobile client customers actually touch.
What you'll do
Build and own the real-time pipeline linking wearable hardware to the AI system
Design and ship backend APIs and the core data layer
Build the frontend/mobile client customers use daily
Work directly with the founding team in a small, high-ownership environment
Location & culture
Fully on-site in the SF Bay Area. The founding team lives and works together for the first several months in a shared house before moving to a standard office - expect an intense, in-person, roughly 9-9-6 pace. Hours flex for exceptional, senior talent; the priority is getting the right person, not saving on salary.
Requirements
Essential
2–5 years shipping scalable production systems end-to-end, ideally at an early-stage startup
True full-stack range: backend/API/data layer AND frontend/mobile (React, React Native with native bridges)
Real-time/low-latency systems experience — either streaming platforms (e.g. Twitch, YouTube, Mux, Cloudflare, Agora, LiveKit) or hardware-constrained domains (drones, robotics, autonomous driving)
Some exposure to hardware-constrained/on-device work
Particularly valuable
Real-time video specifically
On-device/edge experience
Strong front-end/UX craft
Has shipped an AI/LLM/agent pipeline into production
Benefits
Compensation & benefits
Base: $180K–$240K
Equity: 0.25%–0.75%
Visa sponsorship available (O-1, TN, E-3, H-1B1, H-1B transfer, F-1 OPT/STEM OPT)
How to apply: submit your resume and a brief note on the most real-time/latency-sensitive system you've shipped.