Overview
Join us as the Senior Founding Engineer at Proximo, an AI-native company at the intersection of EdTech and HRTech. We're reimagining career navigation in an era where artificial intelligence is transforming work itself. Unlike platforms focused on isolated job changes, we combine elite coaching methodologies with AI to provide continuous, personalized guidance that evolves throughout a person's career. We've already seen success helping individuals with non-traditional backgrounds, like military veterans, translate their unique experiences into industries such as technology and finance. Working directly with our founders, you'll harness emerging technologies to help people discover their full potential in an evolving professional landscape.
As a company innovating career management, we've made this job description intentionally comprehensive - not as a gimmick, but as a reflection of our commitment to open communication and informed decision-making. We want you to have the context needed to evaluate whether this role and opportunity align with your career goals. While this job description provides a strong foundation, we'll discuss specific details about our product, strategy, and vision during the interview process.
Why This Role Matters
As our Senior Founding Engineer, you'll be the technical cornerstone of a venture that aims to fundamentally transform how people navigate their careers. Your work will have direct impact on:
- Individual livelihoods and career trajectories
- The future of career development technology
- Our company's technical foundation and culture
- The evolution of AI-native development and product delivery practices
Thus, this role requires someone who can balance technical expertise with strategic thinking, while maintaining a focus on creating meaningful impact - and safety - for our users. The responsibilities this role will have are:
1. Technical Architecture & Development
- Design and implement core platform infrastructure
- Establish security protocols and compliance standards
- Build scalable systems that maintain personalization
- Appropriately leveraging automation to include latest AI capabilities for development and operations, allowing developers and other teammates to focus on high-value decisions and actions
2. Technical Leadership & Strategy
- Keep abreast of latest technology news, assessing and promoting appropriate capabilities to the team
- Contribute to product strategy and development methodology
- Provide technical insight for key business decisions
- Establish our engineering culture from the ground up
- Mentor future engineering team members
Startup Ecosystem Opportunity
Beyond the core role responsibilities, joining Proximo offers unique exposure to the startup ecosystem:
- Incubator Connections: We're actively engaged with programs like Pear Studio and Berkeley SkyDeck Pad13, providing valuable networking and learning opportunities
- Learning Environment: Gain firsthand experience with the fundraising process and early-stage company building alongside a community of founders
- Ecosystem Access: Connect with mentors, advisors, and fellow technologists in the AI, EdTech, and HRTech spaces
- Technical Impact: Your engineering leadership will be instrumental as we continue developing relationships with investors and accelerator programs . This position offers both professional growth and the chance to help build a company from its foundations with support from established startup ecosystems.
About the Co-Founders
We're experienced professionals who happen to be first-time founders, not novices to the industry or tech. With decades of relevant experience and deep industry connections to this venture, we understand both the opportunity and responsibility of building a company from scratch, and we're looking for teammates who appreciate working with seasoned professionals while being comfortable with the inherent uncertainties of a startup environment. We encourage candidates to:
- Review our LinkedIn profiles and professional history
- Connect with our former colleagues and mutual connections
- Perform backdoor reference checks
- Ask tough questions about our experience and leadership philosophy
- Challenge our assumptions and plans
Technical Requirements
We're looking for someone who has built and scaled systems in production environments. We find this experience correlates to developers with 7+ years in industry, though that tenure is not a hard requirement.
Core Technical Expertise
- Frontend Architecture: Experience building sophisticated, maintainable user interfaces at scale that adhere to accessibility (e.g. WCAG) standards
- Backend Systems: Track record designing reliable distributed systems and data architectures
- Cloud Infrastructure: Deep knowledge of cloud platforms and modern deployment patterns
- Security Implementation: Experience with SOC2 compliance and handling sensitive user data
AI/ML Leadership
- LLM Integration: Practical experience integrating and fine-tuning language models
- RAG Systems: Understanding of retrieval-augmented generation architectures
- ML Infrastructure: Experience with model deployment, monitoring, and optimization
AI-Native Development Vision
- Development Automation: Strategic vision for leveraging AI coding assistants and workflow automation
- Tool Integration: Track record of evaluating and adopting emerging development tools
- Engineering Judgment: Ability to determine where human expertise remains critical
It would be nice if you had
- Early-stage startup experience
- EdTech/HRtech/Future-of-work familiarity
- AI-native development vision
- Team automation experience
As we search for product-market fit, you should value
- Rapid iteration with reasonable quality
- Leveraging automation to allow humans to focus on high-value decisions and actions
- Secure development practices
Once we have PMF, you should value
- Balancing "perfect" solutions with practical implementation
- Deep system architecture thinking
- Maintainable, well-documented code
Compensation & Location/Work Model
As a pre-seed stage startup, we've structured our compensation to reflect both our current stage and our commitment to our early team members:
- Base Salary: $125,000 annually
- For comparison, co-founders are not taking any salary until next raise
- Base salary will increase based on performance with future funding rounds, targeting market-aligned rates
- Equity: Meaningful pre-seed equity with 4-year vesting
- 1-year cliff, monthly thereafter
- Higher than standard market rates
- Current cap table and detailed equity structure will be shared during interviews
- Additional equity potential if growing into CTO role
- SF Bay Area based hybrid model with 2-3 days per week in-office at Menlo Park or San Francisco