Founding Software Engineer
Espa, Headquarters
- Pay
- Not listed by the employer
- Work type
- Hybrid
- Level
- Not stated
- Area
- Software engineering, ML / AI engineering
- Posted
- Nov 10, 2025
About the role
Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid or Remote-First) Type: Full-Time, Founding Team Member Compensation: Competitive salary + founding-level equity
ABOUT US
We are an early-stage AI startup building the first AI-native productivity assistant that seamlessly integrates into your digital life to handle email, calendars, contacts, and tasks and make sure you never drop the ball. Backed by leading venture capital firms including Village Global, Neo, SV Angel, and researchers and executives from Anthropic, Microsoft, Cognition, Quora, Atlassian, and Waymo, we’re assembling a world-class founding team passionate about building scalable, human-aligned AI systems that transform how life gets done.
Our founding team includes repeat entrepreneurs, AI researchers, and early engineers from companies such as Meta, Palantir, Dropbox, and Databricks. Collectively, we’ve built products used by millions, led teams at unicorn-stage AI companies, raised over $100 million in venture capital, and achieved exits to Fortune 500 firms. Together, we bring deep expertise across AI systems design, large-scale engineering, and growth at the intersection of technology and human productivity.
THE ROLE
As a Founding Software Engineer, you’ll report directly to our CTO and own the design and implementation elements of our core agentic infrastructure — from system architecture and data pipelines to the reasoning and orchestration layers that make our agents intelligent and reliable. You’ll work closely with the founders to define the product roadmap, scale our AI systems, and shape the company’s engineering culture from the ground up.
This is a hands-on, high-impact role for a builder who thrives in early-stage environments and wants to have a lasting influence on the trajectory of a company and its technology.
WHAT YOU’LL DO
- Design, build, and scale core backend systems for an autonomous AI assistant platform.
- Architect agentic systems capable of real-time reasoning, tool-use, and long-term memory.
- Develop agent orchestration frameworks integrating LLMs, APIs, and user-facing logic.
- Collaborate with founders on technical vision, product direction, and infrastructure decisions.
- Contribute to early customer pilots and feedback loops to refine the AI product.
- Establish best practices for code quality, reliability, and scalable experimentation.
- Help grow and mentor a small, high-performing technical team as the company scales.
WHO YOU ARE
- 5+ years of software engineering experience, ideally in systems-level or backend development.
- Strong systems design thinking — you approach problems architecturally, not just tactically.
- Experienced agent builder — you’ve built or contributed to agentic frameworks, multi-step reasoning systems, or autonomous tools.
- Proficient in Python, TypeScript, or Go (experience with LangChain, LlamaIndex, or similar frameworks a plus).
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Listed on Espa's Ashby job board; checked 23 h ago. First seen by us 25 h ago. Being listed doesn't mean the team is actively interviewing. We found this board in a public directory and haven't yet confirmed it against the company's own careers page.