Senior Founding Engineer (6+ yrs)

About Agentive 

Agentive lives at the cutting edge of AI, applied to financial audit problems across a global customer base. 

The Role 

As a Founding Engineer, you will bring to the table the ability to take a raw problem from customers or the team, judiciously evaluate tradeoffs, chart a balanced technical course, and turn that dream into a reality that excites. We’re looking for a true technical visionary as well as a well-rounded outcome owner and high-stakes technical decision maker. 

We are intentionally looking across a broad scope of experience, with an emphasis on competence over pure time-in-seat. If the emphasized skills below are a good fit, apply! 

Current professional experience will be considered in compensation and role responsibilities. 

Qualifications 

• Demonstrable, expert understanding of foundational computer science principles – data structures, algorithmic complexity, data modeling, etc. 
• Demonstrable, expert understanding of software engineering principles and the ability to make long-term technical bets
• Humility and commitment to giving and receiving honest feedback 
• AI capabilities move quickly – ability to handle changing priorities and technical goals 
• High ownership and excitement to push the boundaries of what’s considered “possible”

Preferred Skills & Experience 

• React experience at an expert level, or demonstrable equivalent rigorous understanding of reactive programming patterns and lifecycle management 
• Elixir/Rust experience, or demonstrable equivalent rigorous understanding of immutable memory patterns, algorithms, limitations, etc. 
• Design experience, or demonstrable equivalent expertise designing aesthetically beautiful customer experiences that make complex features simple to understand and use

Stuff Engineers Like to Know 

What You’ll Work On 

Examples of complex problems you’ll tackle include: 

• Efficient architectures for processing and rendering high volumes of documents 
• Translating complex financial review processes into clean, robust UI designs and frameworks 
• Building and iterating on agents that satisfy the highest bar of accuracy, precision, and reliability

Our Stack 

• Elixir/Phoenix backend 
• Next.js frontend (TypeScript/React) with CDN and TanStack Query 
• PostgreSQL database with pgvector for vector search and RAG 
• Agents written through both custom frameworks and AI SDK by Vercel

Why Join Agentive 

• The pace is exciting and can be demanding at times to meet customer needs, so we offer flexible hours to help you maximize important values outside of work 
• Cutting-edge, AI-forward development culture: Claude Max plan or equivalent, agentic code reviews, bug fixers, and codebase crawlers orchestrated through GitHub Actions 
• Working on technically challenging, novel problems 
• High autonomy, rewarding environment – see your features in the hands of users sometimes within the same day 
• Being part of a lean but fast-growing, winning team

How to Apply 

Tell us about yourself with your application and (humans only) answer the following question: 

Assuming universally equal priority and impact, which of the following types of problems do you enjoy working on the most? 

No wrong answers – this just lets us know what problems you get most excited about. Assume all are equal priority for the team! 

1. Debug an infinite re-render loop in React affecting a core, high-traffic feature 
2. Address a confusing UI/UX where a feature technically works, but users can’t figure it out 
3. Address a scaling need by investigating cloud resource allocation 
4. Rewrite an inefficient algorithm to meet new performance demands