Founding Engineer (Golang, Agentic AI, Full-Stack)

Top 3 reasons to join us

• Ground-floor opportunity: Shape the technical foundation of a YC-backed AI startup from day one
• World-class founding team: Work directly with founders from Harvard & FAANG
• Significant equity upside: Founding engineer equity package with proven market fit and Sandhill Road backing

About Us

Reforged Labs is a YC-backed, Sandhill Road funded AI startup revolutionizing how the world's top mobile gaming studios market themselves to hundreds of millions of players. We're building cutting-edge AI technology that powers sophisticated ad analysis and generation pipelines for elite global gaming companies.

We don't follow trends; we set them. As a founding engineer, you'll be instrumental in establishing our technical culture and building solutions that rival the best Silicon Valley has to offer.

The Role

We're seeking an exceptional Founding Engineer to join our core team in San Francisco and Vietnam. This is not just a senior engineering role—you'll be a part of the founding team helping define our entire technology stack, engineering culture, and product direction.

You'll own major technical initiatives from conception to deployment, directly collaborating with founders on strategic decisions while building the foundational systems that will scale to serve hundreds of millions of users.

Core Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership: Drive architectural decisions and establish engineering best practices as we scale from startup to scale-up
• Full Ownership: Take complete ownership of core platform components, from agentic AI systems to user-facing applications
• Founding Impact: Help shape product direction, technical strategy, and company culture as an early team member
• System Architecture: Design and build intelligent agent systems, scalable data pipelines, and high-performance APIs
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Work directly with founders, design, and business teams to translate vision into technical reality
• Team Building: Help recruit and mentor the next wave of engineers as we grow the team
• Customer Impact: Build features that directly generate millions in value for top gaming studios globally

Your Skills and Experience

Required Experience

• 5+ years of backend development with complex distributed systems
• Agentic AI Systems: Hands-on experience building and deploying agentic workflows in production
• Expert-level Golang: Demonstrated mastery of concurrency, performance optimization, and production systems
• Cloud Platform Expertise: Deep experience with AWS or GCP production environments
• Full-Stack Capability: Comfortable working across the entire stack when needed
• Startup Experience: Previous experience at early-stage companies (seed to Series A preferred)
• Technical Leadership: History of leading technical initiatives and mentoring other engineers

Founding Engineer Qualities

• Ownership Mindset: You think like an owner, not just an employee—willing to do whatever it takes to make the company successful
• Versatility: Comfortable wearing multiple hats and jumping between different technical challenges
• Strategic Thinking: Ability to balance immediate needs with long-term architectural decisions
• Customer-First: Understanding that great engineering serves great customer outcomes
• Cultural Builder: Help establish the engineering culture and values that will define our team
• Risk-Comfortable: Thrives in uncertainty and ambiguity typical of early-stage startups
• Mission-Driven: Genuinely excited about our vision and willing to commit years to building something extraordinary

Why Join as a Founding Engineer

Financial Upside

• Significant equity package: Founding engineer equity allocation (0.5-2%+ depending on experience)
• Competitive salary for SF market rates

Impact & Growth

• Direct founder access: Work closely with founders on strategy and vision
• Technical autonomy: Freedom to make architectural decisions and choose technologies
• Career acceleration: Founding engineer experience opens doors throughout Silicon Valley
• Global impact: Build technology used by studios reaching hundreds of millions of players
• Learning opportunity: Gain deep experience in cutting-edge AI/ML applications

Culture & Environment

• Y Combinator centric: Heart of the tech ecosystem with access to top talent and investors
• Technical excellence: High engineering standards with adequate time to build things right
• Rapid iteration: Ship meaningful features and see immediate customer impact
• Diverse perspectives: Build an inclusive culture from the ground up
• Work-life integration: Sustainable pace that recognizes founding engineer commitment

Our Engineering Philosophy

As a founding engineer, you'll help establish our core engineering principles:

• Quality over speed: We move fast, but never at the expense of fundamental quality
• Ownership culture: Each engineer owns their domain completely, from architecture to customer success
• Continuous learning: Stay at the forefront of AI/ML developments and engineering best practices
• Customer obsession: Every technical decision ultimately serves our customers' success
• Open communication: Direct, honest feedback and collaborative decision-making

Location & Logistics

• Full Remote: This role is fully remote, though San Francisco is preferred.

Note: This role is designed for exceptional engineering talent who want to build something transformative from the ground up. If you're not ready for the intensity, uncertainty, and ownership that comes with being a founding engineer at a fast-growing startup, this position isn't the right fit.

If you're an exceptional engineer who wants to help build the next generation of AI-powered gaming technology and are excited about the founding engineer journey, we want to talk to you.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company.

Interview Process

Founder Interview (60 mins)

• Vision alignment and founding team chemistry
• Technical background and leadership experience
• Discussion of equity, role expectations, and startup life

Technical Deep Dive (90 mins)

• Architecture and system design challenge
• Live coding session
• Discussion of previous technical leadership experiences

Take-Home Project (1 week)

• Build a foundational component for our platform
• Demonstrate full-stack capabilities and technical judgment

Final Round (2 hours)

• Present and defend your project to the full founding team
• Strategic technical planning discussion
• Culture fit and long-term vision alignment

We move quickly—expect the entire process to complete within 1-2 weeks.