Build -1 → 0
Get on the ground floor with the founding team of a pre-seed or seed-stage startup.
The OpenAI Deployment Company, OpenAI’s new majority-owned deployment arm, is hiring Founding Forward Deployed Engineers for up to $400K, hybrid in SF or NYC with up to 50% travel. You’d own end-to-end, high-stakes enterprise AI deployments at a subsidiary being built from the ground up. The team is looking for engineers with 4+ years who’ve taken high-pressure projects from prototype to production. Apply here!
Nassim Eddequiouaq, former Chief Security Officer at a16z crypto who worked on Meta’s Libra stablecoin and held security roles at Anchorage, Docker, and Apple, is building Bastion, stablecoin infrastructure for custody, orchestration, and issuance. He’s hiring a Founding Account Executive for up to $200K in NYC to build the custody and conversion sales motion from scratch, owning your own pipeline and reporting directly to the CEO. Apply here!
Simon Mo (lead maintainer of vLLM) and Woosuk Kwon (first author of the PagedAttention paper that became vLLM) are building Inferact with fellow core maintainers Kaichao You and Roger Wang. They’re hiring a Founding Product Designer in SF to build the visual identity and developer experience from zero, starting with launch and brand assets, then dashboards and the enterprise product. Apply here!
Dan Bekirov is hiring a Founding Engineer (£100K to £150K) and Founding GTM (£70K to £100K) in London at Sparkles, which builds GitHub-native coding agents that let non-engineers ship real changes to production codebases. It’s a two-person team with paying customers, looking for people who want to work hard on an early product with no playbook. Apply here!
If you’re building something new and want to be featured in the next newsletter, fill out this form.
Build 0 → 1
Accelerate the growth of a Series A, B, or C startup with early momentum.
Max Kauderer is hiring a Product Engineer for up to $265K at Yuzu Health, in-person in NYC. You’ll own features end-to-end, not just the code. This includes working directly with customers and the ops team to identify product gaps, find the clearest path through ambiguous problems, and ship new features from 0 to 1. Apply here!
Thinking Machines Lab is hiring for Research, Safety for up to $475K in SF (hybrid). You'll work across the full model development stack, from pre-training data filtering and harmful capability evals to safety post-training and red-teaming, with particular focus on measuring model behavior on long-horizon and agentic tasks. Apply here!
Víctor Perez and Diego Rodriguez Prado are building Krea, AI creative tools built for control and aesthetic direction rather than prompt roulette. They're hiring a Product Engineer in SF to ship real-time canvas tooling in WebGL2 and CRDTs, and they're explicitly asking for taste, "a strong, well-developed point of view on what good creative work looks like." Apply here!
Jean-Denis Greze (prev CTO of Plaid & eng leader at Dropbox) and Tony Vincent (prev Director of Applied AI Product at Google) are building Town, an assistant that doesn't wait for you to prompt it. They're hiring an AI Context & Data Infrastructure Engineer for up to $300K to be the first person building the retrieval layer the whole product reasons over. Apply here!
Joseph Connor (former teacher, school leader at KIPP and Rocketship, and litigator on school-choice cases) is hiring a Senior Security Engineer at Odyssey for up to $220K, hybrid out of Tribeca. Odyssey builds and operates education savings account programs across 10 states, serving 200,000+ students, and you’d be their first dedicated security hire on a platform handling public money and student data at scale. Apply here!
Mohammad Norouzi (who led Imagen at Google Brain before co-founding the company) is hiring a Founding Marketer at Ideogram, on-site in Toronto. Marketing has lived inside product, design, engineering, and GTM until now, so you’d be the first person whose whole job is the story, working directly with the CEO to turn launches and founder perspective into narratives across X, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Apply here!
Nick Rudder is hiring a Founding Growth Lead at Sphere for up to $260K, five days a week in SF. Sphere’s AI ingests global trade and tax law across 190+ sovereign jurisdictions and produces compliance determinations at millisecond latency, with customers including ElevenLabs, Replit, Deel, Runway, and Lovable. You’d work directly with the founder on brand, SEO, product-led growth loops, and the partner channel. Apply here!
If you’re hiring and want to be featured in the next newsletter, fill out this form.
Build 1 → beyond
Join a growth-stage startup scaling to its next horizon.
Ian Cinnamon (MIT, Stanford GSB, who sold Superlabs to Zynga and Synapse to Palantir) and Maximilian Benassi (seven years scaling production at SpaceX) are mass-producing satellite buses at Apex. They’re hiring a Launch Engineer for up to $175K in LA to own launch campaigns end to end, from payload integration through real-time anomaly resolution during countdown. Apply here!
ElevenLabs is hiring a Head of Music - fully remote globally with SF, NYC, or London preferred. You’ll run the enterprise and consumer music business end to end, overseeing product, licensing, partnerships, and marketing, and be the company’s face across the label and publishing world. Apply here!
Harvey is hiring a Head of Customer Learning for up to $276K in NYC. You’ll inherit an existing Academy, certification program, content library, and the team that runs them, then turn customer education into a revenue-relevant function and figure out how to teach an entire industry to work with AI. Apply here!
Anduril is hiring a Software Product Manager, Factory Systems for up to $219K, in office in Costa Mesa. You’d build Forge Factory from the ground up, the software that maps Anduril’s physical factories into a digital model and connects their warehouse, execution, and asset systems into one environment. Apply here!
Waymo is hiring a Head of Logistics for up to $294K in Mountain View (hybrid). You’ll build the logistics org from empty headcount and architect the multi-modal network that moves vehicles and sensitive hardware between deployment nodes, including trade compliance and tariff strategy. Apply here!
Figma is hiring a GTM Systems Architect for up to $245K in SF, NYC, or remote US. You’ll be responsible for optimizing, scaling, and governing Salesforce across Sales, Customer Experience, Marketing, Legal, Product and Finance, combining business analysis, systems expertise, and data stewardship. Apply here!
Upcoming events in SF
a16z is co-hosting Ground Truth with Sphere - an invite-only event for senior engineers in SF on Thursday, September 17th! There will be technical panels on reliability guarantees in production AI, human-in-the-loop design, and compliance as a competitive moat alongside top engineering leaders. Insights from Zubin Singh Koticha (Raindrop), Anirudh Jain (Forus), Abhi Verma (Harvey), Tamjid Rahman (Valon), Vamsi Chitters (Luminai), and Conor Murphy (Databricks). Plus, more panelists to be announced. Spots are limited - apply to join here!
Decagon is hosting their second annual Dialogues in SF on October 1st at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. It's a full day on how AI is actually changing customer experience, with keynotes from co-founders Jesse Zhang and Ashwin Sreenivas, plus Eric Phillips (Chief Digital Officer at Delta Air Lines) on transforming the experience at one of the world's largest airlines. Industry sessions feature Samuel Liyanage and Misty Shafer Sterne (American Airlines), Diana Rainesh (Ticketmaster), Louis Rownd (Away), and more. Register here!
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