Founding Backend Engineer
Founding Backend Engineer — AI Agents on SAP
In-person, Bay Area (Stanford-adjacent) · $120K–$150K base + 0.1%–0.25% equity
We're building AI agents that do the actual work of enterprise SAP development — writing code, driving live SAP systems, and producing the deliverables that today take expensive consultants months. Some of the world's largest consulting and advisory firms want to use it now, and we're in active conversations with Fortune 100 enterprises across healthcare, retail, and beyond. We're hiring a founding backend engineer to help build it — and we'll personally train you* to operate years ahead of your résumé.
You do not need to already know Go, Python, AI agents, or SAP. We will teach you. We're hiring for raw ability and drive, not a checklist of tools. The one thing we can't teach you in six weeks is computer science — so a strong CS foundation is required.
What makes this rare: a founder-led apprenticeship
Most first engineering jobs hand you a narrow ticket and let you figure out the rest over years. We do the opposite.
Your first 4–6 weeks are a paid, intensive training program taught personally by our founders. AltitudeIQ's founder previously built and scaled Coding Dojo, one of the most successful coding bootcamps in the U.S. (later acquired) — and his co-founder was his right hand in growing it. Between them they've spent over a decade teaching engineers and building companies. Now they're compressing the judgment that normally takes 10–15 years on the job into the foundations and mental models of senior- and principal-level engineering, taught in weeks instead of years.
After the program, you keep both founders as ongoing mentors as you build real product, shoulder-to-shoulder, on a small team. This is acceleration you simply can't buy as one of thousands of junior engineers at a big tech company.
What you'll learn
A taste of the curriculum:
- System & Software Architecture — designing systems and software that scale and last
- Product Ownership — owning a feature end-to-end, thinking like an engineer and a product builder
- UX Thinking — designing software people actually want to use
- Performance Optimization — making real systems fast under real load
- Security & Threat Defense — hardening applications against attackers
- Compliance — building for SOC 2, HIPAA, and enterprise governance from day one
- AI Fundamentals & Agents — neural-network basics and building production AI agents (LangGraph/LangChain) to accelerate your own work and the company's
What you'll build
You'll work across our stack — Go and Python — on the hardest, most interesting problems in applied AI:
- AI agents that do real work: agents that reason over a real filesystem, write and activate ABAP, drive a live SAP GUI, and generate formal enterprise deliverables (Word/Excel/PDF) — with human approval gates built in
- Sandboxed agent execution: per-project isolated environments (Docker today, Kubernetes + Kata/gVisor microVMs next) where agents run code safely with git-versioned artifacts
- Multi-tenant isolation: namespace, network, and authorization design so no customer can ever reach another's systems, credentials, or data
- Agent orchestration: LangGraph state machines with human-in-the-loop interrupts, multi-provider LLM support, and SSE streaming to a live frontend
- Observability at scale: cross-service request tracing across React → Go → Python → sandbox (OpenTelemetry, LangFuse, Grafana)
These are genuinely hard, frontier problems — the kind that make you a great engineer fast.
Why this is a smart bet, not a risky one
The thing that kills most startups — searching for product-market fit for years — is already behind us. We have two products that reinforce each other:
- The AI agent platform (your primary focus) is taking off: leading global consulting firms want it immediately, with multiple Fortune 100 enterprises in active conversations. The market it addresses is enormous.
- Our enterprise data-quality & governance platform** is already live with two Fortune 100 customers, more in the pipeline, and a partnership with Accenture alongside other global systems integrators — proof we can ship and sell to the most demanding enterprises on earth.
On top of that: founded by Stanford GSB alumni (3 of our 5 co-founders), seed-funded by Ulu Ventures (Palo Alto), and currently part of StartX, the Stanford-affiliated accelerator. You'd be joining a company that has already found its market and is scaling — with the upside of a true ground-floor seat.
Who you are
- Strong CS fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, systems). This is our one hard requirement.
- Fresh grad from a top program, or ~1–3 years of experience — both welcome
- Hungry and high-agency — you want to grow fast and you're willing to put in the work
- An excellent communicator, written and verbal — we sell to large enterprises, and in the AI era clear thinking and clear communication are what separate great engineers from the rest
- Coachable and curious — you'll learn more here, faster, than anywhere else, and you're excited about that
Don't know Go, Python, AI agents, or SAP? Apply anyway. We're betting on trajectory, not a list of tools you already happen to know.
What we offer
- In-person, Bay Area — our home base will be near Stanford (we're setting up shortly after StartX)
- Base salary: $120,000–$150,000
- Equity: 0.1%–0.25%, standard 4-year vesting — meaningful early-employee ownership
- Paid founder-led training program
How to apply
Send your résumé plus short answers to three questions (keep it concise — how you write is part of what we evaluate):
- What's the hardest thing you've built in the last 12 months — what made it hard, and how did you overcome it?
- What do you want to get better at as an engineer, and why?
- What makes you different from other strong engineers?