Founding Data Engineer

Founding Engineer | San Francisco (Onsite) | $165K–$190K base

We've partnered with an AI-native startup rebuilding how one of the world's largest and least-digitised supply chains actually runs: the multi-trillion-dollar market for electronic components. Their platform brings modern pricing intelligence and automation to distributors who are still running decades-old ERP systems, some installed back in the 90s. They are already live in production with top-tier independent distributors processing hundreds of millions in transactions a year, and growth is accelerating largely through word of mouth. The company is backed by a $3M+ seed round led by Wischoff Ventures, with Liquid 2, Stage 2, Rebellion VC and Entrepreneur First also on the cap table. The founding team pairs deep manufacturing and industry expertise with serious technical pedigree: the CTO was the first AI hire at an a16z-backed startup, and the co-founder has scaled a business from early revenue into the tens of millions.

This is a rare opportunity to join as one of the first engineers and own entire product streams from your first week. You will work directly with the CTO in a flat, fast-moving team, ship features straight to real customers, and build the data infrastructure that the whole product runs on. It comes with meaningful early-stage equity and a clear path to leading your own engineering team as the company scales. If you want real ownership, direct customer contact, and the intensity of a small team building something big in a legacy industry ripe for change, this is it.

The Role

As a Founding Engineer, you will:

Build and harden robust data pipelines that process live production data from legacy ERP systems for distributors turning over hundreds of millions a year.

Own a product stream end to end, from customer conversations to shipped features, within your first couple of weeks.

Deploy and customise data ingestion tooling across multiple customers, each with different file formats, ERPs and integration requirements.

Talk directly with non-technical customers to learn the industry and gather requirements, translating what you hear into what you build.

Contribute to AI agent development as the data layer matures, including voice applications and agent-based data ingestion.

About You

You have 2 to 5 years of engineering experience, with meaningful time spent in a startup. This is a founding hire, so we are not able to consider new graduates.

You are a strong generalist who is comfortable across SQL, Python and TypeScript, and you enjoy building and maintaining production data pipelines.

You are a clear, concise communicator. A lot of this job is explaining technical work to operators who have run their businesses for decades and have no interest in your stack. The first stage is a 20 minute conversation with the CTO, and it rewards people who get to the point.

You have a genuinely competitive streak with something to show for it. Sport at a serious level, competitive programming, chess, music to a high grade, anything where you have been measured against other people and cared about the result.

One of these backgrounds fits you: a generalist or data-focused engineer from a fast-moving startup, a standout builder with a strong open-source or side-project portfolio, or an engineer with a high-bar company on their CV who wants far more ownership.

Nice to have: exposure to voice or agent-based data ingestion.

You are based in or ready to relocate to San Francisco and happy to work onsite five days a week.

Visa sponsorship is available, including OPT and H1B transfers and a J1 to O1 conversion path. US-based candidates are preferred, with strong UK-based candidates also considered.

The process runs to four stages and ends with a paid day-long work trial, so you see the real work before committing. The team is moving quickly with this hire. If you're interested in being a founding engineer bringing AI to a multi-trillion-dollar supply chain still run on legacy systems, apply now or send your CV directly to will@inventurerecruitment.com.