Metrics Recruitment is seeking a Founding Software Engineer for an early-stage, venture-backed startup building the next generation of AI advertising infrastructure. Their self-serve dashboard enables advertisers to place targeted ads directly inside AI-generated responses, creating a new, sustainable revenue channel for the AI ecosystem. They have strong early traction, significant advertiser demand, and recent seed funding led by a top-tier VC.

As a Founding Software Engineer, you’ll work directly with the founding team to build high-performance systems that connect advertisers and AI applications at scale. You’ll design core components of the infrastructure, publish SDKs, and deliver production systems that can support rapid, continuous growth.

This role is suited for highly capable engineers who thrive in a fast-moving environment, want deep technical ownership, and are motivated by impact rather than structure.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and scale backend and frontend systems to support exponential ad growth
• Develop SDKs across multiple languages and frameworks
• Build advertiser dashboards, developer tools, and integration layers for AI platforms
• Improve data collection, routing logic, and reinforcement learning systems
• Contribute to bidding and matching algorithms for ad placement
• Own projects end-to-end, from design through deployment and monitoring
• Collaborate directly with founders, product, and data to define technical priorities
• Option to recruit and lead a small engineering team over time

Requirements

• Proven experience building and shipping production systems or consumer apps
• Strong proficiency in at least 2–3 modern languages (Python, Node.js, React preferred)
• Experience with scalable backend architecture and data organization
• Hands-on with AI codegen tools such as Cursor and Claude
• High technical competence and problem-solving ability across the stack
• Willingness to work in a demanding, high-output environment
• Comfortable in an early-stage startup with fast iteration and minimal structure

Nice to Have

• Experience with ad systems, monetization platforms, or bidding engines
• Familiarity with LLMs, AI tools, or conversational interfaces
• Knowledge of scaling SDKs or high-traffic web systems
• Familiarity with Supabase, Railway, or similar cloud-native architectures

Compensation: $200,000 – $350,000 USD + equity

Location: San Francisco, CA