Heretic
AI

Founding Engineer

Heretic · San Francisco · $84k - $120k

Actively hiring Posted about 3 years ago
About Heretic 

Heretic Ventures is a San Francisco-based venture studio ideating and launching new businesses in the creator economy, including those that capitalize on AI/ML technology. Heretic is run by Managing Partner Mariam Naficy, who founded and built the pioneering internet companies Minted and Eve.com. Heretic is backed by household names in Silicon Valley (investors and entrepreneurs), who act as the studio’s advisors both in selecting and in advising companies.

Overview of Role

Heretic Ventures is seeking an experienced full-stack, hands-on Founding Engineer to build the first version of NewCo, a new generative AI consumer business that Heretic Ventures is launching. Depending on interest, the Founding Engineer could also be part of the team that shapes, vets, prototypes and tests other new venture ideas.

The ideal candidate has personally built and launched a consumer product from scratch and is ready to work with new technologies and architectures in a flexible, forward-thinking organization that’s always pushing boundaries. This person will have complete, end-to-end ownership of the consumer-facing launch of the product and will code the product themselves. The Founding Engineer has experience building products across the stack and a firm understanding of web frameworks, APIs, databases, and multiple back-end languages.

This is a unique opportunity to help build a billion-dollar company from the ground up while learning from successful repeat entrepreneurs and a stable of powerful and experienced mentors and advisors. While we would prefer a permanent hire, we are open to discussing a contract role - please approach us to discuss. 

This is a hybrid role with the expectation of 3 days per week in-person in our sunny Presidio, SF office. The position is compensated with salary, benefits, and equity.

Objectives of this Role

    • Partner with the founding team to code and deploy NewCo MVP product 
    • As product is validated, scale technical team by hiring and mentoring additional engineers 

Responsibilities

    • Collaborate closely with founding team members to translate product strategy into buildable MVP that can be rapidly deployed for testing 
    • Lead the team in selecting the appropriate technology stack, framework, and tools to enable experimentation 
    • Own the architecture and development of v1 of working product 
    • Strategize and articulate tradeoffs between speed and scalability 
    • Iteratively build and improve on product based on feedback from users 
    • Think long term to turn MVP into a scalable solution 

Qualifications

    • Bachelors or Masters in Computer Science, Engineering, or other technical field 
    • Has personally built and launched a consumer product from scratch
    • Has experience managing the end-to-end technology stack of a new product (front end, backend, cloud, CI/CD) 
    • Prior full-stack engineering experience in a fast-growth organization
    • Expertise in programming languages (e.g., Typescript, JavaScript), modern web frameworks (e.g., React), and cloud service providers (e.g., AWS, GCP)  
    • Superb communication, collaboration, and execution skills 

Nice to haves

    • Experience or interest in hiring engineers and managing a team of engineers 
    • Understanding of leading AI/ML models (text to image models) and tools (e.g., PyTorch) 

Tags & focus areas

Used for matching and alerts on DevFound
Founding Member Founding Engineer Dev Aws Javascript React Typescript Engineer Gcp Pytorch
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