US Founding Engineer

About Encord

At Encord, we're building the data infrastructure for AI applications. The biggest challenge companies building models face today is data quantity and quality. For most teams, this crucial step is both the most costly and time consuming. We’re here to change that.

We believe AI is at a stage similar to the early days of computing or the internet—where the potential is clear, but the surrounding tools and processes are still catching up. That's why we started Encord. Backed by $50M in funding from top investors like CRV and Y Combinator, we have big plans ahead and are looking for an exceptional US founding engineer to lead our efforts.

The role

As a Founding Engineer, you will be kicking off our engineering operations in San Francisco. You’ll be responsible for all development and support for our US operations and will be building across the technical stack and taking holistic ownership of product development.

About You

Are a builder: You enjoy all aspects of building not only software but a complete product and are comfortable moving across the stack. You enjoy problem solving and think from first principles. 

Operate at speed: You’re always looking to accelerate without compromising on quality.

Seek high impact: You want your work to have a tangible outcome for people. You're not satisfied when building products that do not see the light of day or move a metric by a tenth of a percent.

Are comfortable with uncertainty: You're happy to tackle problems without a predefined clear definition or obvious solution, and are excited to have autonomy to make decisions as you go.

Are a team player: You understand that being a member of a high-performing team requires two things. You contribute your best work. You also help others contribute their best. You enjoy lending a helping hand when needed and levelling up those around you.

Are experienced: You have seen a lot and built a lot. You have hands-on developed and maintained multiple systems from scratch and you know what trade offs are involved in building reliable, performant software at speed

What to expect

High performing team: You'll join the small team that has built a product that our customers love. Members of the team are veterans of both established companies and successful startups. While the team is more than a sum of its parts, every member is impressive in their own right

Impact: Your work will have a direct and multiplicative impact on the entire company.

End-to-end ownership: You will be entrusted with end-to-end ownership of your projects. From product, design and architectural decisions, all the way to deployment, monitoring and measuring impact on users. You will work across the stack, covering everything from deployment to styling. We expect each other to take initiative, be proactive in problem-solving, and continuously seek improvements.

Autonomy and collaboration: We work autonomously on projects, make decisions, and drive our work forward. But as a lean and high trust team, we remain quick to collaborate and support each other with challenging problems together.

Scale and simplicity: You will tackle complex domains and immense scale with simple solutions. You'll leverage your expertise to solve challenging problems in simple ways.

Technology stack

We are technology agnostic at Encord. We use Python and Typescript across our codebase and technologies like Postgres, Clickhouse, Pytorch and Ray. We lean into boring technology.

Below is a detailed breakdown of all the technologies we use.

- Backend: Python

- Frontend: Typescript and React

- Kubernetes for deployment

- GCP for underlying infrastructure

- Machine Learning: PyTorch, CUDA, Ray

We encourage people from all backgrounds, cultures and skill levels to apply. It is okay to not meet all requirements listed as we are looking for individuals who are passionate, eager to learn.

What We Offer

- Competitive salary and equity in a hyper-growth business. 

- Strong in-person culture: most of our team is in the office 3+ days a week.

- Room to grow into anything you desire — a year ago we were 25 people, now we're 60. We will be growing incredibly fast over the next 24 months and you'll have all the growth opportunities you can handle.

- 18 days annual leave a year + public holidays.

Encord offers a unique opportunity to be part of a startup with a clear mission and vision. You will get to explore and build services enterprise AI use cases across many different industry verticals such as healthcare, surveillance, retail, agriculture, and many more. 

Our work is at the cutting edge of computer vision and deep learning, which also includes working on solving unsolved problems within those fields.