Founding Engineer
Saint Louis, MO, 63119
Reference ID: 32067051
Date Posted: 03/27/2026
Job Title: Founding Engineer
Location-Type: Remote
Start Date Is: 2-3 weeks from offer
Duration: Direct Hire
Compensation Range: 150-170k Equity
Surround Sound Media is an AI-native platform rebuilding local journalism across America. They autonomously collect, structure, and publish hyper-local news for communities that have lost their newsrooms — covering local government, schools, businesses, and sports from a single intelligent platform. With $7M raised, $2.7M in ARR, and a roadmap to scale from dozens of outlets to thousands, they're solving hard engineering problems at the intersection of AI and civic impact.
This is the founding engineer role. You'll join as the first full-time engineer, working directly with the CTO to build the core platform from the ground up — LLM-powered data agents, multi-agent agentic workflows, and the cloud infrastructure to run it all in production. Nothing is inherited. You're shaping the architecture, making foundational decisions, and owning major platform components end-to-end from day one.
Job Description:
- Build the data ingestion layer: scrape, parse, and structure data from local government records, public feeds, and hundreds of local sources at scale
- Design and implement multi-agent agentic workflows for entity extraction, article generation, and research automation using LLMs
- Deploy and manage cloud infrastructure on AWS — set up services, write Terraform, build and maintain CI/CD pipelines
- Build prompt regression testing and LLM output evaluation pipelines to ensure factual accuracy and consistency in production
- Own reliability: when something breaks in production, you're one of two engineers who can fix it — and you own that responsibility
- Work directly with the CTO and CEO, context-switching between deep technical depth and business conversations
- Make product calls when needed — you're figuring out what to build and why, not just executing tickets
Requirements:
- 4–8 years of software engineering experience with a core strength in backend Python: async frameworks, task queues, and PostgreSQL
- Hands-on AWS experience — you've set up services, written Terraform, and debugged CI/CD pipelines (not necessarily a DevOps specialist, but not afraid of it)
- Production LLM experience: you've shipped real agentic applications — multi-agent orchestration, entity extraction, LLM output evaluation — in production, not just prototypes
- AI coding tool fluency: you actively use Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or equivalent as a core part of your daily workflow — this is non-negotiable
- Proven self-direction: you figure out what needs to be built and build it — you don't wait for a perfectly scoped ticket
- At least one tenure of 3 years at a single employer, OR an active track record of side projects if coming from a large company
- Clear, articulate answer for why you want to be a founding engineer at an early-stage startup right now
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