Founding AI Engineer
Quick facts
- Pay
- $175,000 - $220,000 + equity
- Type
- Full-time
- Location
- San Francisco, CA
- Background
- Bachelor's degree
- Industry
- Information Technology — 671 open jobs
- Visa in listing
- H-1B, OPT
- Apply
- Free to apply — never pay anyone for a job offer or visa sponsorship
Job description
San Francisco, CA · On-site (5 days per week) · Full-time Compensation: $175,000 to $220,000 + competitive early-stage equity
About the Company
Our client is a seed-stage company building AI agents that work as IT technicians for small and midsize businesses, delivered through the managed service providers that support them. The agents investigate support tickets, work across the systems technicians use every day, and take approved actions on their behalf. The longer-term ambition is to become the IT infrastructure layer for small and midsize businesses, moving beyond ticket resolution into networking, security, backups, and data management. Founded 2024 · 4 people · Industry: AI, B2B, Enterprise, Security
The Role
This is a founding engineering seat on a team of four. You would work directly with the founders across the entire product, from the distributed infrastructure underneath it to the agents themselves to the features customers touch. The team is in the office together five days a week, jams on problems in person, and leans hard on AI across its own internal work.
What you'll be doing
- Building and improving AI agents that investigate and resolve IT support tickets across live customer environments
- Scaling infrastructure and distributed systems to keep pace with customer growth and reliability demands
- Shipping across a wide surface area, frontend through backend through integrations, driven by direct customer feedback
- Working alongside the founders day to day on a roadmap that moves quickly
- Optionally sitting with customers to understand their problems and shape where the product goes
Requirements
- Two to five years building software across the full stack
- A track record of shipping production systems and then living with them, at a scale of roughly fifty customers or more
- Practical command of LLM APIs, prompt engineering, and agent architectures
- A founding-engineer disposition: side projects you actually ship, and readiness for the pace and commitment an early team demands
- Clear communication, the ability to make a complicated problem simple, and decisiveness about what matters first
Nice to Haves
- AI agents or tool-using LLM systems you have run in production, not just prototyped
- Time at an early-stage startup, somewhere between seed and Series C
- Exposure to enterprise IT, security, or identity management
- A bachelor's degree in computer science or a comparable technical field
- Depth in distributed systems and backend infrastructure
- Comfort owning front-end product work as well as the layers beneath it
Why Join
- A genuine founding-engineer seat: you shape the product and the engineering culture, not just the tickets
- Seed funding from one of the most respected venture firms in the market, with founders out of frontier AI research and high-growth enterprise software
- A very large and largely untouched market, with signed customers and adoption already running ahead of expectations
- Agentic systems at the core of the product rather than AI added on top of something that already existed
$175K to $220K base plus competitive early-stage equity
Details
- Location: San Francisco, CA
- Work policy: On-site, 5 days per week
- Compensation: $175,000 to $220,000 + competitive early-stage equity
- Visa sponsorship: Open to visa transfers (for example OPT or H-1B transfers)
- Employment type: Full-time
Visa sponsorship record
No public sponsorship records foundWe didn't find H-1B, H-1B1, E-3 or green card (PERM) filings under the name David Joseph & Company in the Department of Labor and USCIS data. That doesn't mean the job can't be sponsored — the company may file under a different legal name, be new to sponsorship, or sponsor a visa that isn't in these datasets (for example H-2B or J-1).
Tip: ask the recruiter early, in writing, which visa they sponsor and whether they cover the legal and filing fees.
Which visas can work for this job
Occupation: Software Developers (SOC 15-1252).
- Mentioned in the listing
H-1B, OPT
- H-1B cap-exempt employer
Regular cap-subject employer — a new H-1B needs to win the lottery in March (unless you already hold cap-counted H-1B status).
- TN (citizens of Canada and Mexico)
This kind of role may fit the USMCA profession “Computer Systems Analyst (or Engineer, for engineering-degree holders)” — it depends on the actual duties. No lottery, no cap; you need the matching degree or license.
- E-3 (Australia) and H-1B1 (Chile, Singapore)
Same degree requirement as H-1B, but no lottery and a separate quota that is rarely filled.
- O-1 (extraordinary ability)
For candidates with awards, publications, press, a high salary or critical roles at distinguished organizations. No cap, no lottery; the employer files a petition.
- STEM OPT extension (F-1 students)
Requires an E-Verify employer. We didn't find this company in the E-Verify list — ask HR.
Salary vs prevailing wage
Level II (qualified)Software Developers · San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. Annual prevailing wages set by the Department of Labor (OFLC).
| Level | Prevailing wage | H-1B lottery odds* |
|---|---|---|
| Level I | $137,093 | ~15% |
| Level II | $165,131 | ~31% |
| Level III | $193,149 | ~46% |
| Level IV | $221,187 | ~61% |
This job pays $175,000–$220,000 a year — that's Level II (qualified). In the wage-weighted H-1B lottery a Level II registration gets 2 entries; estimated selection chance about 31%.
* Odds are DHS projections for the FY2027 wage-weighted lottery (actual results vary by year and employer). Since the FY2027 cap season the H-1B lottery is weighted by wage level: Level I = 1 entry, II = 2, III = 3, IV = 4. The level is set by the offered wage against the prevailing wage for the occupation and worksite. Separately, a $100,000 fee for new H-1B petitions for workers outside the US was announced in 2025; as of September 2026 a federal court ruling keeps it unenforceable while appeals continue — check the current status.
Sources: U.S. Department of Labor OFLC disclosure data (H-1B/H-1B1/E-3 LCA, PERM), OFLC prevailing wage data, USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub, E-Verify participating employers. Data loaded: LCA FY2024–FY2026, PERM, USCIS Data Hub, OFLC wages; updated 2026-10-03. Employers are matched by name, so records of companies with similar names can occasionally be mixed up. This is general information, not legal advice — talk to an immigration attorney about your case.