Lemma Verified
Advertising Technology (AdTech)
Founding Engineer
San Francisco, CAOnsiteFull Time$150,000–$200,000 /yrPosted 2 months agoHidden Gem · YC Startup
Required skills
- production software
- shipping well outside specialty
- TypeScript
- whole codebase
- frontend
- core service
- data at volume
- cost per event
- product sense
- rough problem
Nice to have
- customer
- ran agents in production
- got burned
- testing standards
- on-call story
- ships on a Friday
Role summary
Lemma is seeking a Founding Engineer to be the first non-founder/contract engineer. This role will be instrumental in establishing the company's engineering culture, including testing standards and deployment processes. The engineer will work across the entire product loop, from ingest to UI, and will be responsible for the trust surface, ensuring reliability and quality. This position requires direct customer interaction and involves making critical, long-term technical decisions. The ideal candidate has 3+ years of production software experience, strong TypeScript skills, comfort with large-scale data, and a solid product sense, with bonus points for prior experience running agents in production.
Lemma reads all of your agent conversations, finds the failures nobody knew to look for, and opens the PR that fixes them.
### Why this role exists
You'd be the first engineer here who isn't a founder or a contractor.
That means there's no engineering culture waiting for you to join it. The testing standards, the on-call story, how we decide what ships on a Friday, all of that is currently whatever the two of us happened to do last month. You'd be setting it, and you'd be living with it longer than we will.
There's also no work stream attached to this job. You go where the gap is. Some weeks that's detection quality, some weeks it's the ingest pipeline choking on a customer whose instrumentation is a mess, some weeks it's the review UI that decides whether someone trusts our PR enough to merge it. We hire this role because the constraint on a team this size is almost never a specialist.
### What you'll do
* Ship across the whole loop: ingest, detection, patch generation, verification, the product people actually look at
* Own the trust surface. Reproduction, guardrails, and the checks that keep a bad PR from ever reaching a customer's repo
* Take a problem from a customer conversation to something shipped, without waiting for a spec
* Talk to customers directly. You'll be in their Slack, reading their traces, hearing what broke before we do
* Make calls that outlive you. Schema decisions, service boundaries, what we're willing to be slow about
### What we're looking for
* 3+ years shipping production software, and a track record of shipping well outside whatever you'd call your specialty
* Strong TypeScript. It's the whole codebase, frontend through the core service
* Real comfort with data at volume. You've thought about cost per event, not just correctness
* Strong product sense. You can take a rough problem and return something well considered without a Figma file waiting for you
* You've built with agents and have opinions about why they fail
* Bonus: you were the customer once. You ran agents in production and got burned
We move fast on hiring. Target is an offer within two weeks of first contact.
Onsite in San Francisco. We sponsor visas.
### Why this role exists
You'd be the first engineer here who isn't a founder or a contractor.
That means there's no engineering culture waiting for you to join it. The testing standards, the on-call story, how we decide what ships on a Friday, all of that is currently whatever the two of us happened to do last month. You'd be setting it, and you'd be living with it longer than we will.
There's also no work stream attached to this job. You go where the gap is. Some weeks that's detection quality, some weeks it's the ingest pipeline choking on a customer whose instrumentation is a mess, some weeks it's the review UI that decides whether someone trusts our PR enough to merge it. We hire this role because the constraint on a team this size is almost never a specialist.
### What you'll do
* Ship across the whole loop: ingest, detection, patch generation, verification, the product people actually look at
* Own the trust surface. Reproduction, guardrails, and the checks that keep a bad PR from ever reaching a customer's repo
* Take a problem from a customer conversation to something shipped, without waiting for a spec
* Talk to customers directly. You'll be in their Slack, reading their traces, hearing what broke before we do
* Make calls that outlive you. Schema decisions, service boundaries, what we're willing to be slow about
### What we're looking for
* 3+ years shipping production software, and a track record of shipping well outside whatever you'd call your specialty
* Strong TypeScript. It's the whole codebase, frontend through the core service
* Real comfort with data at volume. You've thought about cost per event, not just correctness
* Strong product sense. You can take a rough problem and return something well considered without a Figma file waiting for you
* You've built with agents and have opinions about why they fail
* Bonus: you were the customer once. You ran agents in production and got burned
We move fast on hiring. Target is an offer within two weeks of first contact.
Onsite in San Francisco. We sponsor visas.
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