Founding Engineer — Kiloforge

• →1–5 years of experience as a software engineer with experience building AI-driven products [Required]

• Experience shipping products or features from ideation to real users with significant traction [Must have]
• Previous founder or early-stage startup experience strongly preferred; bonus for YC or a16z alums [Strongly preferred]

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field [Required]
• Degree from a top-tier university (e.g., Berkeley, Stanford, CMU) [Strongly preferred]

• Proficiency in agentic development: specifically, designing and building orchestration pipelines across multiple agents, tools, and services [Must have]
• Full-stack proficiency with a backend focus (Python, JavaScript, Kotlin, Go all acceptable) [Required]
• Active user of modern AI tooling (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor, etc.) [Required]

• Must have at least one clear signal of excellence: hackathon wins, side projects with significant traction, impressive fellowships, YC founder, etc. [Must have]

• Pretraining or fine-tuning ML researchers — looking for applied agentic builders, not model trainers
• Pure Big Tech career with no side project, startup, or scrappy chapter
• History of short tenures (<1 year) at multiple companies

Salary$180K–$225KEquity1.0–1.5%On-site policy5 days/week in SoMa, SF; relocation support availableVisa sponsorshipYes — transfers availableEmployment typeFull-timeLocationSan Francisco, CA

1. Describe an agentic system you've built. What were the agents, how did they coordinate, and what was the outcome for the end user?
2. Where do you see your career going over the next 5 years?
3. Can the candidate be on-site in SF? If not, are they willing to relocate?
4. What is their salary expectation?
5. How actively are they recruiting?

Stage 6 — Candidate Hired Full bounty paid when candidate accepts and starts.

Updated May 1, 2026

Top-Tier Fellowship / Accelerator Programs a16z speedrun, Y Combinator, South Park Commons

High-Growth AI Startups & Companies Known for Top-Tier Engineering Talent (internships included) Decagon, Glean, Perplexity, Airbnb, Anysphere, Vercel, Stripe, Sierra Nevada Corporation, Hebbia, Cursor, Replit, Mercor, Modal Labs, Pinecone, Scale AI, LangChain, Figma, Databricks

For reference only — do not source these specific profiles.

Arda Akman — LinkedIn Ex Delve | Thunder | Berkeley, CA

• Founder DNA: co-founded ObviousAI and won Universal Ventures pitch competition
• Founding engineer at Delve (YC24)
• True generalist: data pipelines, public APIs, and security at Sigma Computing; Berkeley CS

Jayaditya Sethi — LinkedIn Mandolin | UC Berkeley CS | Building in AI | San Francisco Bay Area

• Big tech startup trajectory
• Owned a full vertical at Mandolin
• Built production agent pipeline with confidence-thresholded LLM routing; Berkeley CS

Ethan Jagoda — LinkedIn Currently building in stealth | Berkeley CS | San Francisco Bay Area

• Codepoint Fellow founding engineer trajectory
• Co-founded Tiny Dorm music community at Berkeley (2.5 years)
• Full-stack + ML across SHV portfolio (Observe, Sutter Hill Labs); Berkeley CS

• End-to-end product ownership: Ensure candidates demonstrate founder-level product ownership and have shipped complete products with real user traction — not just ML experiments.
• Agentic development experience: Prioritize candidates with clear applied agentic development experience across full-stack systems; reduce focus on pure ML research or model training backgrounds.
• Elite signals: Seek candidates from top-tier backgrounds or with standout external signals (YC, hackathon wins, side projects with traction) that align with a high-agency startup environment.
• Individual rejections to date: "Portfolio or GitHub quality is weak" (after HM review); "Not enough experience" (after HM review); "Skills mismatch" (after HM review); multiple "Miscellaneous" rejections (after HM review).