Startup Engineer Jobs in San Francisco
SF startup engineer roles concentrate at pre-seed through Series A companies. The segment where the title is most accurate. Comp at SF builder-role startup engineer roles commonly runs $150k–$200k base + 0.5–1.5% equity at seed stage. Expect 4–5 days in-office. The work is the broadest in the entire market: writing code, talking to customers, running events, debugging the deploy, occasionally writing marketing copy.
5 active median salary $250k
| 1. | 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 |
| 2. | Founding Engineer & CTO (NovusMinds AI) San Francisco, California, United States | on-site | full-time | executive | python, typescript, go | 5mo ago |
| 3. | Software Engineer, AI (Ruli) San Francisco, California, United States | $110,000 – $200,000/yr | hybrid | full-time | entry | python, typescript, serverless | 5mo ago |
| 4. | 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 |
| 5. | Software Engineer - AI (NovusMinds AI) San Francisco, California, United States | on-site | full-time | senior | python, typescript, go | 5mo ago |
Frequently asked questions
- What does a startup engineer in san francisco earn?
- SF compensation runs at the top end of the band. Founding engineer offers commonly clear $200k base + 0.5–2% equity at seed-to-Series-A. The typical band for a startup engineer runs $120k–$200k base + early-stage equity.
- Are startup engineer jobs in san francisco remote-friendly?
- 0 of the current 5 listings (0%) allow remote work; the rest are on-site or hybrid in San Francisco.
- What companies hire startup engineer jobs in san francisco?
- Jobs Base aggregates listings across YC-backed startups, growth-stage companies, and selected larger companies hiring with builder-role characteristics.
- What's the difference between a startup engineer and a regular startup engineer?
- Jobs Base only lists builder roles. Positions where one person owns the product end-to-end. We filter out ticket-driven, narrowly-scoped roles even when the title matches. About 9% of listings scraped match this definition.