Founding Staff Engineer

Weekday (YC W21)

. Work directly with the founders and founding product designer to build, launch and rapidly improve the product .

Posted 10/14/2026full-timeRemote • IndiaLead💰 ₹5,000,000 - ₹10,000,000 per yearWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates expertise in building and operating production systems with a focus on large language models, data modeling, and product decision-making. Capable of designing experiments and evaluations to enhance user experience and product retention.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Large Language ModelsProduction EngineeringSystem DesignTypeScriptNext.js

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

Data ModelingAPIsConcurrencyBackground WorkProduction ReliabilityAI AgentsLLM EvaluationFull-Stack DevelopmentBenchmarksEvaluations

Soft Skills

Product Decision-MakingCommunicationChallenging FoundersUser Experience Focus

Tools & Technologies

Postgres

Industry Keywords

Consumer ProductsProduction SystemsExperimentsObservabilityEngineering Standards

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

JavaScriptNext.jsPostgresTypeScript

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Work directly with the founders and founding product designer to build, launch and rapidly improve the product
Ship the complete product from database to reader-facing interface
Use coding agents for implementation while focusing on product decisions, experiments and AI trust boundaries
Own the production loop, including data modeling, streaming, background work, concurrency, payments, credit ledger, deployment and observability
Ensure production events are reconstructable for diagnosing failures
Develop benchmarks and evaluations for continuity, character behavior, narrative quality and failure modes
Design memory and context systems for stories spanning hundreds of turns
Select and assign models to different tasks
Own retrieval, orchestration, cost and latency decisions
Establish maintainable engineering standards around agents
Test multiple approaches rapidly and make evidence-based product and infrastructure decisions

Requirements

What you’ll need

5+ years of experience
Real production engineering depth
Ability to build with models, context, memory and evals
Experience shipping consumer products end to end
Experience building and operating production systems with language models at their core
Experience diagnosing and fixing failures with real users
Ability to design experiments before building custom infrastructure
Ability to build meaningful evaluations
Strong knowledge of databases, APIs, concurrency, background work and production reliability
Design instinct and confidence making product decisions without a detailed specification
Genuine interest in product retention and user experience
Ability to explain complex technical decisions in plain English
Comfortable challenging founders and advisers
Preferred: several years as a full-stack product engineer
Preferred: experience as one of the first engineers at an early-stage company
Preferred: strong technical education such as IIT, NIT, IIIT or BITS
TypeScript, Next.js and Postgres experience
Experience with frontier models over APIs and background jobs
Must-have skills: Large language models, Backend, System Design
Good-to-have skills: AI agents, LLM Evaluation, Full-Stack Development

Benefits

Comp & perks

Tooling, compute and model budget for real experiments
Founders available daily and technical advisers available as a sounding board
Broad ownership and a path to Head of Engineering as the team grows