Founding Engineer

About Proliferate

Proliferate is building the operating system for modern engineering.

We are building the company in person in SoMa, San Francisco. We care a lot about intensity, craft, and working with people who want to do the best work of their careers. We work hard, and we also take health seriously: company-expensed Whoop, meaningful health and wellness budget, and top-tier insurance.

About the Founder

I (Pablo) finished my master's in AI at 19 and joined Onyx (YC W24) as engineer #1, where I spent a year building enterprise AI search before starting Proliferate. You can see what I shipped there here. We’ll be working closely together.

About the Role

You’d be one of our first engineering hires and build the core product. This is a high-ownership role across product, systems, and user experience.

Example work:

• Build a new core workflow end to end across agent runtime, product UI, and cloud infrastructure.
• Design and ship a new interface for human-agent collaboration made possible by a model capability that landed last week.
• Turn a rough customer pain point into a polished product surface in days.
• Re-think how engineering teams review, redirect, and trust agent work before merge.

Who We’re Looking For

We have an extremely small, flat, talent-dense team. We value urgency, taste, truth-seeking, and people who care deeply about the quality and impact of their work.

You might be a great fit if:

• You've shipped products from 0 to 1
• You want a role that is unusually dense in learning, ownership, and pace
• You want to work with teammates who have very high standards
• You care deeply about what you build and who you build it with
• You want to do your life's work and enable other people to do theirs

Stack

TypeScript, React, Next.js, Python, Postgres, Redis, AWS, Rust

Comp & Benefits

Top-of-market salary plus meaningful equity, full health/dental/vision, all meals covered, equipment budget, and a monthly health and wellness stipend.

Interview Process

1. Initial questions (3 minutes)

4 short questions through Work at a Startup. Emphasis on short! Should be around 3 sentences max per answer

2. Phone call with Pablo (15 minutes)

A quick call to get to know each other

3. Technical round (30 minutes)

We’ll talk through a technical problem together with a codebase open on your end

4. Work trial (1-3 days, $1-3K)

Come to our office by Salesforce Park in SF and we'll try working together. If this isn't possible due to extenuating circumstances, we can make accommodations

5. References + Offer