Founding Engineer roles like this are rare: a chance to be one of the first engineers building an enterprise AI platform from the ground up, with founding equity to match.
We’re partnering with Ember AI to find a Founding Engineer who wants to build an ambitious Enterprise Intelligence platform from the ground up.
Ember was co-founded by Deborah Liu, former CEO of Ancestry, VP at Meta and senior product leader at PayPal. You’ll work directly with Deborah and a deeply experienced Silicon Valley founding team with a strong track record of building and scaling technology products.
Most enterprise employees lose hours every week searching for information that already exists across Slack, email, documents and internal systems. Ember is building the intelligence layer that turns this scattered knowledge into persistent organisational memory and proactive AI agents.
Backed by a $10 million seed round, with early revenue and major enterprise customers already onboard, Ember is now making a critical founding engineering hire.
What you’ll own
• Build the core agent platform, including triggers, tools, approvals, memory, evaluations, observability and workflow execution
• Take products from customer discovery and technical design through to launch and iteration
• Work across the stack, with a strong emphasis on backend and platform development
• Speak directly with enterprise customers to understand workflows and solve real problems
• Help shape Ember’s architecture, roadmap, engineering practices and culture from day one
What we’re looking for
• 3–7 years of professional software engineering experience
• Genuine 0-to-1 experience as a founder, founding engineer or early startup hire
• Strong backend engineering skills and the ability to work across the full stack
• Experience shipping AI-powered products or features into production
• Familiarity with LLM APIs, RAG, agent orchestration, agentic workflows or evaluations
• A Computer Science degree or equivalent technical qualification
• Confidence operating autonomously in a fast-moving and ambiguous environment
• An active interest in AI-native development and tools such as Claude Code
• Comfort working directly with customers on discovery, delivery and debugging
Why Ember?
• Build a meaningful AI platform from its earliest stages
• Work directly with proven Silicon Valley founders
• Join a well-funded company with real enterprise customers and early revenue
• Influence the product, technical architecture and engineering culture
• US$180K–$250K plus meaningful founding equity
• Remote within the US, with San Francisco Bay Area candidates particularly encouraged
Applicants must already have unrestricted US working rights. Visa sponsorship is not available.
About this Founding Engineer role
As a Founding Engineer at Ember AI you will shape the architecture, the product and the engineering culture itself. You will work directly with the founders, ship fast across the stack, and own decisions that most engineers wait a decade to make. The role is US remote with a preference for the SF Bay Area, paying US$180K–$250K plus meaningful founding equity.
Why apply for this Founding Engineer opportunity through Big Wave Digital
Big Wave Digital is a specialist technology recruitment agency that has placed engineers into high-growth AI startups for over a decade. We give every Founding Engineer candidate direct insight into the founders, the funding and the roadmap before you interview, so you can make the call with confidence. Our process is fast and transparent: an initial conversation about your goals, a technical deep-dive with the team, and a founder interview — typically wrapped up inside two weeks. We will also help you weigh the equity component properly, because at this stage of a company it matters as much as the base salary. You will get honest, direct feedback at every step, and we never share your details with a client without your explicit permission first. If you have been waiting for the right Founding Engineer move, apply now — this one will not stay open long.
