Senior / Staff Founding Engineer (AI/ML & Full-Stack)

$165k – $200k • 0.5% – 1.0% equity - Location: Seattle - 5+ years exp - Full Time - In office - Visa sponsorship available Company Description: Optimly is building Nielsen for AI — except we don't just measure how brands show up in AI search, we improve it. When people ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity what to buy or who to trust, a brand's fate is decided inside a black box: what the model retrieves, what it recommends, what it says about you. We make that measurable and movable. Optimly audits how AI represents a brand across all four major models, captures the demand signals AI crawlers leave behind, and traces recommendations back to their sources — that's the attribution half. Then we close the loop: we give marketers the tools to actually change the answer — a verified source of truth AI resolves to, a weekly highest-priority fix, and the machine-readable surfaces models trust. Measurement tells you where you stand; Optimly also helps you take action. It's a category the size of marketing measurement itself, plus the effectiveness layer measurement that traditional marketing measurement companies never built — and it barely exists yet. We're early, the impact surface is enormous, and we want an entrepreneurial engineer to build it with us from the ground floor. Role Description: As a Senior / Staff Founding Engineer, you'll bridge heavy AI/ML systems and production-grade full-stack architecture. You'll partner directly with the founder to own Optimly's two halves: the measurement and attribution engine that tells brands how AI sees them, and the improvement engine that helps them change it. This is a high-autonomy, hands-on role. You'll help us move from prototypes into scalable systems, architect the multi-model evaluation engine, and build the closed loop that turns a measurement into a shipped fix and a measurably better business outcome. You should thrive in ambiguity, love first-principles problems, and can use AI tools to maintain an elegant codebase without sacrificing velocity. What You'll Do - Architect & build: Design and implement end-to-end full-stack features across our app (Postgres, GCP Cloud Run) and Python/TypeScript services. - Build the measurement engine: Own the pipelines that audit ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, score how each represents a brand, and track deltas over time. - Own attribution: Connect AI-crawler demand signals (what models ask, which endpoints they hit, at what cadence) to brand outcomes, so marketers see what's actually moving how AI recommends them. - Build the improvement loop: Ship the systems behind BrandVault (the verified source of truth AI resolves to), Fix Cards (the one high-priority action we send each week), and the AI Press Room — the levers that turn a measurement into a better result. - Run at the edge: Extend our AI Brand Index on Cloudflare Workers — the agent-readable layer (llms.txt, schema.org JSON-LD, structured endpoints) that AI crawlers resolve to. - Close the loop and prove it: Instrument the whole system so we can show a change shipped here moved the number there — measurement → action → measured lift. Must-Have Experience - 7+ years of professional software engineering with a track record of shipping production-grade applications. - AI/ML production depth: real experience deploying LLM applications, agentic/multi-model orchestration, RAG, and robust evaluation systems — well beyond basic prompt engineering. - Full-stack proficiency: expert with Python (ML/data pipelines) and TypeScript / Node / Next.js / React. - System design & scale: strong command of asynchronous and event-driven architectures, message queues, and Postgres optimization. - Data instinct: comfort designing measurement, analytics, and attribution pipelines where correctness and reproducibility matter. - Startup mindset: you take a loosely defined problem and independently deliver a clean, production-ready solution. Bonus (Huge Advantage): - Prior founding-engineer or early-employee experience at a fast-growing startup. - Background in marketing analytics, attribution, measurement, or mar-tech/ad-tech infrastructure. - Edge computing (Cloudflare Workers), MCP, or knowledge-graph experience. - Expertise in LLM observability, eval design, cost tracking, and mitigating model drift/hallucination. Key Skills - Multi-model evaluation - Agentic AI orchestration - Python & TypeScript - React & Next.js - RAG & embeddings - High-scale system design (async workers, queues) - Edge compute (Cloudflare Workers) - Postgres & data modeling - Measurement & attribution pipelines What's In It For You - High ownership & autonomy: shape the product, tech stack, and engineering culture from day one. - Direct founder collaboration: work side-by-side with zero bureaucratic layers. - A category to define: measurement and effectiveness for how brands live inside AI — Nielsen-sized, still at the ground floor. - A number you can trust: our edge is that we measure honestly and publish our own error rate — improvement built on attribution nobody has to take on faith. Accuracy over attention, all the way down. - In-person in Seattle.