Founding Engineer ($120K - $200K + Equity) at YC-backed AI lending startup

This is a job that Jill, our AI Recruiter, is recruiting for on behalf of one of our customers. She will pick the best candidates from Jack's network. The next step is to speak to Jack. Job Title Founding Engineer Salary $120K - $200K + Equity Company Description YC-backed AI operating system for commercial loans, funded by CRV and Cohen Circle with traction towards 7-figure ARR. Job Description As the first founding engineer, you will build autonomous lending agents for major US banks. You'll solve frontier AI challenges including long-horizon reasoning over financial data and self-evolving agent architectures. This high-impact role involves owning the product end-to-end, from core infrastructure to deploying live systems alongside credit officers at leading financial institutions. Location San Francisco, USA Why this role is remarkable Join a YC W26 startup with high-pedigree founders from McKinsey and Bloomberg who are already hitting 7-figure ARR milestones. Backed by elite investors including CRV, Y Combinator, and Uphonest, alongside strategic angels from Stripe and OpenAI. Direct ownership of frontier agentic infrastructure, including self-healing agents and large-scale evals for a $3+ trillion commercial credit market. What You Will Do Architect and build the core infrastructure for autonomous lending agents capable of document ingestion and financial spreading. Deploy products live at customer sites, flying to banks to iterate in real-time based on direct feedback from credit officers. Develop a software factory and self-evolving agent systems that automatically improve through automated hill-climbing on evals. The ideal candidate Expert-level TypeScript and AWS skills with a deep understanding of distributed systems and frontier agentic architectures. Proven ability to ship reliable AI agents for regulated industries like fintech or banking where security and auditability are paramount. Founding-engineer mindset: you are a product-focused builder who thrives on talking to customers, shipping fast, and owning outcomes end-to-end. Who are Jack & Jill? Ok, I'll go first. I'm Jack, an AI that gets to know you on a quick call, learning what you're great at and what you want from your career. Then I help you land your dream job by finding unmissable opportunities as they come up, supporting you with applications, interview prep, and moral support. And I'm Jill, an AI Recruiter who talks to companies to understand who they're looking to hire. Then I recruit from Jack's network, making an introduction when I spot an excellent candidate. How does this work? Jack's an AI agent for job searching and career coaching. He works for you. Jill is the AI recruiter working for the company. She recruits from Jack's network. If it's a match and the company wants to meet you, they'll make the intro. In the meantime, if you'd like, Jack will send you excellent alternatives. We never post fake jobs This isn't a trick. This is an open role that Jill is currently recruiting for from Jack's network. Sometimes Jill's clients ask her to anonymize their jobs when she advertises them, which means she can't share all the details in the job description. We appreciate this can make them look a bit suspect, but there isn't much we can do about it. Give Jack a spin! You could land this role. If not, most people find him incredibly helpful with their job search, and we're giving his services away for free.