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Founding engineer

Variant (a16z)Tel Aviv-Yafo, Tel Aviv District, IsraelNot specifiedFull-timeSeniority: Not specified

Posted 30 days ago · 29 applicants

Salary not listed for this role

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Willbi insight

The role in plain words

Must-have
  • Strong generalist engineer with experience across the stack
  • 5+ years of professional software engineering experience (or equivalent depth)
  • Experience building and working with AI agents or agentic systems
  • Experience working with large-scale data (event streams, analytics, high-volume datasets)
  • Strong understanding of the browser runtime ecosystem (JavaScript execution, DOM, performance, security, edge cases)
Nice-to-have
  • Experience with AI/ML-powered products
  • Background in experimentation, personalization, analytics, or growth platforms
  • Previous early-stage startup or founding experience
  • Experience owning and operating production systems in customer-facing environments

Extracted from the job description · kept up to date automatically

Who this suits

Full job description

Original listing · kept for reference

We’re a fast-growing AI Personalization startup working with leading brands in Israel and the US, backed by top a16z, and top Silicon Valley VCs. Our platform helps brands uncover conversion leaks and deliver personalized, optimized experiences in real time.

We’re looking for a Founding Engineer to join as one of the first technical hires and help shape the product, architecture, and engineering culture from an early stage. This is a hands-on role with high ownership, working closely with the founding team on both product and technical direction.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and ship core product features end-to-end

• Build agents, harness, tools, skills and scale existing agentic workflows

• Make architectural decisions across frontend, backend, and infrastructure

• Work closely with founders on product direction and technical strategy

• Build scalable, reliable systems that operate in high-traffic production environments

• Develop systems that enable real-time personalization and experimentation

• Balance fast iteration with robustness, performance, and long-term maintainability

• Help define engineering best practices, tooling, and culture

Requirments

• Strong generalist engineer with experience across the stack

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience (or equivalent depth)

• Experience building and working with AI agents or agentic systems

• Experience working with large-scale data (event streams, analytics, high-volume datasets)

• Strong understanding of the browser runtime ecosystem (JavaScript execution, DOM, performance, security, edge cases)

• Solid fundamentals in system design, APIs, data modeling, and performance

• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and making high-impact technical decisions

• Strong ownership mindset — you care deeply about outcomes, not just implementation

Tech Stack

• We don’t expect expertise in everything, but you should be comfortable working across much of the following:

• Backend: Node.js, JavaScript

• Frontend: React, JavaScript

• Cloud & Infra: GCP

• Data: BigQuery, PostgreSQL, Redis

• Messaging / Streaming: Google Pub/Sub

Bonus (Not Required)

• Experience with AI/ML-powered products

• Background in experimentation, personalization, analytics, or growth platforms

• Previous early-stage startup or founding experience

• Experience owning and operating production systems in customer-facing environments

Why Join

• Founding-level impact and equity

• Direct influence on product, architecture, and technical direction

• Opportunity to work on hard, real-world problems at the intersection of AI, data, and UX

• Build technology that runs on some of the world’s most recognizable D2C brands

• Work closely with an experienced founding team

About Variant (a16z)
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Variant (a16z)
Posted 30 days ago · 29 applicants
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