Actual AI LogoActual AI

Founding AI Engineer

Seattle • On‑site, five days/week

About Actual AI

The biggest barriers to AI adoption in software engineering are the friction of human context switching and the opacity of context for AI agents. Actual AI is the glue that enables the modern software‑engineering team. Already serving Fortune 20 customers, we're hiring founding engineers who want to change how software gets built - forever.

Why we need you

If you’re already squeezing every last drop of productivity out of AI; you’ve tried Cursor, Claude, Gemini and all the rest; you’ve built AI agents; and you dream of reinventing software development, we should talk.

What you'll do

You will own Actual AI's ability to understand how every developer and agent works. Diving deep into code understanding and by integrating additional context from every possible data source, you will build the features that become table stakes for every software engineering team.

You might be a great fit if you

  • Are an experienced software engineer. This is not an entry level position. There is no strict YOE requirement, but you must have extensive referencable experience.
  • Have felt the pain of context-switching between code, tickets, and CI dashboards and believe intelligence should unify it.
  • Have built developer-focused tools. SDKs, CLIs, IDE plugins, or internal dashboards - that eliminated manual steps and saved teams hours of toil.
  • Are experienced with code analysis techniques (AST parsing, dependency graphs, embeddings) and have applied them to real-world projects.
  • Thrive on end-to-end ownership, from data pipelines and model deployment to integrating insights into user-facing workflows.
  • Bonus points: You've built at, or founded, a fast growing startup
  • Bonus Bonus points: Advanced degree in CS or AI
  • Bonus Bonus points: You've contributed to open source AI dev tools.
  • Extreme bonus points: You're already day dreaming about what you can accomplish with an significant AI tooling budget

Compensation & perks

  • $140‑$180k salary
  • Large founding‑engineer equity
  • Full benefits
  • Relocation assistance
  • Brand‑new hardware
  • Truly unlimited AI‑tooling budget (seriously)

Hiring process at a glance

Incredibly simple and transparent. Absolutely no leetcode.

Start with founder chats. Follow with a 60‑min architecture deep dive. Then, a paid on‑site day. Wrap up with references & offer.

Apply for Founding AI Engineer

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