What does a founding engineer typically earn?

Typical compensation for a founding engineer runs $130k–$220k base + 0.5%–2% equity. Salaries skew higher at well-funded US startups and lower outside the US; equity grants vary sharply by stage.

How many founding engineer jobs are remote-friendly?

Across the current 19 active listings on Jobs Base, 3 (16%) are fully remote. The rest split between on-site and hybrid.

How often are new founding engineer jobs posted?

Jobs Base ingests new founding engineer jobs continuously. New listings appear daily across the major sources we ingest.

Founding Engineer Jobs

Founding engineers are the first or second engineering hires at a venture-backed startup. The job is half "ship the product" and half "make every technical decision that the company will live with for the next five years." A typical week looks like: write the API, ship the dashboard, talk to two paying customers, fix the deploy pipeline, interview the next hire, decide whether to use Postgres or DynamoDB. There are no PMs, no QA team, no separate ops engineer. You absorb all of those roles until the company can afford to split them out.

19 active 16% remote median salary $275k

1.	Founding Engineer (Lance (YC W26)) San Francisco, California, United States \| $160,000 – $300,000/yr \| on-site \| full-time \| entry \| python, javascript, software development \| 5mo ago
2.	Founding Engineer ($170K - $250K + 0.5% - 1.5% Equity) at Healthcare AI startup backed by Scale AI Angels (CoffeeSpace) San Francisco, California, United States \| $170,000 – $250,000/yr \| on-site \| full-time \| senior \| python, typescript, cloud platforms \| 5mo ago
3.	Founding Engineer & CTO (NovusMinds AI) San Francisco, California, United States \| on-site \| full-time \| executive \| python, typescript, go \| 5mo ago
4.	Founding Engineer (Recruiting from Scratch) New York, New York, United States \| $170,000 – $185,000/yr \| hybrid \| full-time \| lead \| python, django, typescript \| 6mo ago
5.	Founding AI Engineer (Part Time) - Prompt Engineering & LLM Applications (Y22 AI) United States \| remote \| full-time \| entry \| prompt engineering, llm applications, python \| 5mo ago
6.	Founding ML Engineer (TrueMile.AI) San Francisco, California, United States \| hybrid \| full-time \| lead \| machine learning, supervised learning, reinforcement learning \| 6mo ago
7.	Founding ML Engineer / Series A / NYC / $250k + Founding Equity (Open Talent) New York, New York, United States \| $250,000 – $500,000/yr \| on-site \| full-time \| lead \| python, pytorch, llms \| 6mo ago
8.	AI Founding Engineer (Supply Veins (Techstars '24)) California, United States+1 \| hybrid \| full-time \| entry \| neural networks, pattern recognition, natural language processing \| 5mo ago
9.	Founding AI/ML Engineer / Startup / $500k+ / NYC (Open Talent) New York, United States \| $500,000/yr \| hybrid \| full-time \| lead \| llms, rag, agentic systems \| 6mo ago
10.	Founding Backend Engineer (Wingback Security) San Francisco Bay Area, United States \| on-site \| full-time \| lead \| python, go, typescript \| 5mo ago
11.	Founding Machine Learning Engineer (Medical AI) (DeepRec.ai) California, United States \| $170,000 – $250,000/yr \| on-site \| full-time \| lead \| machine learning, representation learning, llm interpretability \| 6mo ago
12.	Full Stack Engineer (Underdog.io -Apply to top tech jobs in 60 seconds. A place where companies apply to you) New York City, New York, United States \| hybrid \| full-time \| mid \| react, next.js, typescript \| 6mo ago
13.	Software Engineer (Underdog.io -Apply to top tech jobs in 60 seconds. A place where companies apply to you) Brooklyn, New York, United States \| hybrid \| full-time \| senior \| python, node.js, rust \| 6mo ago
14.	AI Builder Intern - Agentic AI (Tabhi) Austin, Texas, United States \| on-site \| internship \| internship \| agentic ai, llms, agent frameworks \| 5mo ago
15.	Machine Learning Engineer, Robot Learning, Loco-Manipulation (Path Robotics) Columbus, Ohio, United States \| hybrid \| full-time \| senior \| python, pytorch, mlops \| 5mo ago
16.	Software Engineer - AI (NovusMinds AI) San Francisco, California, United States \| on-site \| full-time \| senior \| python, typescript, go \| 5mo ago
17.	DevSecOps Engineer - AI (NovusMinds AI) San Francisco, California, United States \| on-site \| full-time \| senior \| devsecops, ai security, llm security \| 5mo ago
18.	Entrepreneur in Residence - Technical Co-founder (CTO) (FutureSight) United States \| remote \| full-time \| executive \| applied ai, b2b, ai \| 5mo ago
19.	Head of Product - AIVM (Agentic AI & Blockchain Platform) - Asia (ChainGPT) India+417 \| remote \| full-time \| executive \| product management, ai/ml infrastructure, blockchain \| 5mo ago

Frequently asked questions

What is a founding engineer?: Founding engineers are the first or second engineering hires at a venture-backed startup. The job is half "ship the product" and half "make every technical decision that the company will live with for the next five years." A typical week looks like: write the API, ship the dashboard, talk to two paying customers, fix the deploy pipeline, interview the next hire, decide whether to use Postgres or DynamoDB. There are no PMs, no QA team, no separate ops engineer. You absorb all of those roles until the company can afford to split them out.
What does a founding engineer typically earn?: Typical compensation for a founding engineer runs $130k–$220k base + 0.5%–2% equity. Salaries skew higher at well-funded US startups and lower outside the US; equity grants vary sharply by stage.
How many founding engineer jobs are remote-friendly?: Across the current 19 active listings on Jobs Base, 3 (16%) are fully remote. The rest split between on-site and hybrid.
How often are new founding engineer jobs posted?: Jobs Base ingests new founding engineer jobs continuously. New listings appear daily across the major sources we ingest.