Founding Distinguished Engineer

This is not a job. It is the rarest kind of technical opportunity: the chance to be the Innovator-in-Chief of a category that does not yet exist. We are looking for a Founding Distinguished Engineer whose career has already reached the pinnacle of Big Tech (Meta E9, Google L9, Apple ICT6, or equivalent) and who is ready to channel that mastery into something that will define the next decade of how businesses are built. You are not joining an engineering team. You are becoming the engineering team's gravitational center.

There are 36.2 million small and medium enterprise founders in the United States alone, and the vast majority of them are drowning. They cannot afford a CFO, a General Counsel, a CMO, or a COO. They juggle formation paperwork, tax deadlines, payroll, compliance calendars, and customer acquisition while simultaneously trying to build the product or service that inspired them in the first place. The result is burnout, costly mistakes, and businesses that fail not because the idea was bad, but because the operational weight was unbearable. We are building the world's first Digital Co-Founder: an AI-native execution engine that forms C-Corps and LLCs, manages daily operations, tracks finances with double-entry bookkeeping, handles compliance, and acquires customers. This is not an AI assistant. This is a full operational co-founder from day one.

You will architect the Neural Core: the AI orchestration layer that makes all of this possible. This means designing and building multi-agent orchestration across 9+ microservices, implementing cost-aware model routing (CostRouter) that dynamically selects between thrift, quality, and premium AI tiers based on task complexity and budget constraints, and enforcing governance guardrails that ensure every AI action passes through the Sandwich Pattern (deterministic preparation, probabilistic generation, deterministic validation). You will own the ComplianceMux that redacts PII before it ever reaches an external provider, the simulation framework that lets the entire platform run with zero external calls, and the event architecture that ties it all together. You will make decisions about when to use Redis pub/sub versus synchronous HTTP, when to introduce new abstraction boundaries, and when to resist unnecessary complexity.

You will work in an AI-native development culture where AI is not a bolt-on feature but the foundational substrate of the platform. Every engineer on the team uses AI coding tools daily, and the platform itself is built to be callable by AI agents through the Nexus SDK. You will mentor the engineers who join after you, establishing the technical standards, code review culture, and architectural decision records that will scale from a founding team to 50+ engineers. You will pair directly with the CEO on product and technical strategy, operating as a true technical co-founder with full architectural authority over a 90,000+ line-of-code production codebase.

This role is not about climbing a ladder. You have already climbed every ladder there is to climb. This is about legacy. It is about the rare, career-defining moment where a technologist with deep expertise gets to define an entire category, build the technical foundations of what could become the fastest-growing platform in agentic commerce, and do it from the very beginning. Founding team equity. Full architectural authority. A seat at the table where every consequential decision is made. If you have spent your career preparing for a moment like this, we want to hear from you.