AI Engineer - Infrastructure at Aurora

Founding Engineer — AI Agents & Outbound Infrastructure

San Francisco, CA · On-site · Full-time - Relocation required

$200K–$250K base + up to 1% equity

The company

The company is building precision outbound software for sales teams that need lead discovery, signal monitoring, sequencing, and workflow control to work in production.

The product is already used by 40+ YC companies and growing. The company is backed by Y Combinator and has raised $5.2M.

The team is five people. The founders have Harvard/MIT CS backgrounds and have built and sold before.

This is a product with real operational constraints: multi-tenant data, multiple sender accounts, customer-specific workflows, and interfaces that non-engineers have to use every day.

The role

This is a founding engineer role for someone who wants to own the core AI agents and the infrastructure behind them, then make that complexity usable through a product sales teams can set up in minutes.

You will work directly with customers and founders. That means technical decisions are shaped by real workflows, not a long product handoff.

You will help shape product direction through technical judgment and customer feedback, especially where product behavior and infrastructure are tightly coupled.

The scope spans backend systems, frontend product surfaces, and operational reliability. If you want a narrow feature lane, this role will feel too broad.

The technical problem

Outbound is hard because the inputs are messy and the failure modes are expensive.

The system has to identify hyper-targeted leads from ICPs, conference attendees, hiring signals, and other public data; monitor what prospects post, share, and engage with across social platforms; and orchestrate email and LinkedIn sequences across dozens of domains and sender accounts.

At the same time, it has to support multi-tenant architecture with role-based access control, end-to-end encryption, SOC 2-ready audit logging, and rate limiting built in from day one.

The hard part is not one good model call. The hard part is building a system that is accurate enough to trust, observable enough to operate, and flexible enough to extend as customers ask for new workflows.

What you'll own

• Lead discovery agents: design systems that identify and rank prospects from ICP definitions, conference lists, hiring signals, and related public data.
• Signal monitoring: build the pipelines that track what prospects are posting, sharing, and engaging with across social platforms.
• Multi-channel sequencing: own orchestration across email and LinkedIn, including many domains and sender accounts.
• Tenant-safe infrastructure: implement multi-tenant architecture, RBAC, encryption, audit trails, and rate limits.
• Product UX: turn complex outbound workflows into interfaces sales teams can understand and configure quickly.
• Operational quality: improve observability, failure handling, and debugging so the team can ship without guessing.

Who this is for

You are likely a fit if you have:

• 1–4 years of experience building production systems and user-facing features.
• Strong experience with TypeScript, React, Next.js, and Python.
• Comfort with distributed systems, concurrency, and performance tradeoffs.
• The ability to talk to customers, extract signal from vague feedback, and ship concrete solutions.
• High agency and a bias toward ownership over waiting for a perfect spec.
• Good judgment about reliability, access control, and operational clarity.
• The ability to move across backend, frontend, and infrastructure without losing the thread.
• Comfort working in a role where technical decisions affect both product usability and system reliability.

Bonus points

• Experience with AI/ML, LLMs, prompt engineering, or building AI agents.
• Previous startup experience or B2B SaaS shipping.
• Design judgment for complex workflows.

Tech stack

• TypeScript
• React
• Next.js
• Python

Why now

The product already has traction with 40+ YC companies, so the next constraint is system quality: the company needs the agents, orchestration, and product surfaces to stay reliable as usage grows.

This is the point where backend architecture, workflow design, and interface decisions compound. The systems built now will define how quickly the team can add customers and new workflows later.

This role is not for you if

• You want narrowly scoped tickets.
• You only want backend or only want frontend.
• You do not want customer-facing work.
• You are uncomfortable owning infrastructure, permissions, or reliability.
• You prefer established process over deciding the structure as you go.

Compensation and logistics

• Base salary: $200K–$250K
• Equity: up to 1%
• Location: San Francisco, CA
• Work model: on-site, 5 days a week in Union Square
• Employment: full-time
• Visa sponsorship: case-by-case
• Benefits: health, dental, vision, unlimited PTO

Interview process

Typical process:

• Behavioral call with a co-founder
• Technical interview with a co-founder
• In-person work trial

About Aurora

Aurora helps exceptional engineers find the right role at some of the most ambitious startups worldwide.

We work with teams that value high ownership, strong technical standards, and clear scope.