
Founding Engineer
San Francisco, CAFull-time$120–200K/yrSeen 2w agoStill listed 1 day ago
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At a glance
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Job overview
Pluto is building a professional network where users can tell an agent whom they want to meet, and the agent finds relevant people and helps create connections. The Founding Engineer will work directly with the founders on conversational AI, people search, data infrastructure, and consumer product, building on existing technology, proprietary data, and an established business.
Skills & qualifications
Skills
Qualifications
Full job description
Pluto is building the headless professional network for the AI era We started with AI that understands professionals beyond their resumes. Over 30,000 professionals have spoken with it, and agents at 50+ companies, including Mercor, Warp, and David AI, use our data to hire. That business is at a $2.6M annualized revenue run rate. Now we're making that capability available to everyone. Professional networking is still painfully manual: search LinkedIn, sift through profiles, hunt for contact info, send cold messages, and hope someone replies. We've already automated that entire process for companies. Next, we're building a network where anyone can simply tell an agent who they want to meet. It finds the right people, understands why they're relevant, and helps turn those searches into real connections. The role You'll work directly with the founders to build agents that search, reason, remember, and take action on behalf of users. The work spans conversational AI, large-scale people search, data infrastructure, and consumer product. It's a true 0-to-1 build without starting from zero. You'll have existing technology, proprietary data, and a proven business underneath you. What you'll do
- Own major parts of the product end-to-end, from architecture to polished user experience
- Build agents that understand intent, reason across complex information, and take real-world actions
- Design scalable systems for people search, retrieval, and personalized recommendations
- Work with founders and users to turn ambitious ideas into products people love
- Make foundational technical decisions and set engineering practices as we scale
- Shape the engineering culture and help hire the team
What we're looking for
- Full-stack: strong TypeScript, React, Next.js, Node.js, and PostgreSQL
- AI engineering: production experience with LLMs, agents, tool calling, or AI workflows
- Technical judgment: you design scalable systems and make pragmatic architecture calls
- Ownership: you've shipped products end-to-end with minimal oversight
- Startup mindset: you move fast, handle ambiguity well, and like working closely with founders
Bonus points
- Voice AI or conversational agents
- Search, recommendation systems, or data infrastructure
- Early-stage or founding engineer experience
- Cloud infrastructure, deployment, and production reliability
How this job compares
Set against the 34,885 open Software Engineer jobs on Olive Jobs, counted October 29, 2026.
- Pay
- This posting$120–200K/yr
- California median$165–246K/yr7,408 salary ranges
- US median$140–222K/yr28,048 salary ranges
This range's midpoint, $160K, is 22% below the California median midpoint ($205K) — in the lowest quarter of Software Engineer salary ranges in California.
- Openings
- Olive Jobs lists 9,190 open Software Engineer jobs in California and 34,885 across the US. 7% of them nationwide are listed as remote or flexible.
- Experience
- This posting asks for at least 1 year of experience — less than three in four Software Engineer postings that state a minimum ask for (median 5 years, across 28,135 postings).
- Education
- 12,578 of the 34,885 open Software Engineer jobs (36%) ask for a bachelor's degree or higher.
Counted across the open, public US postings on Olive Jobs on October 29, 2026. Pay medians are the middle values of the low ends and of the high ends of postings that list both ends of a range in the same cadence (a yearly salary or an hourly rate); a range's midpoint is halfway between its ends. Pay and experience figures resting on fewer than 20 postings are left out.
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