Founding Engineer

About Chief AI

We’re building AI to power the world’s leaders — from Senators to CEOs.

Chief AI is the command center for leaders, where executive offices in government and business manage time, relationships, and strategy in one place. Think how Linear reshaped product teams and Salesforce reshaped sales teams. We’re transforming how leaders and their teams operate.

Founded by Shannon Beckham (White House, Congress, Together AI), Chief AI is the solution she wishes she had while supporting high-powered decision-makers. We’ve launched at SXSW, been featured in Axios, and published a case study with the Mayor of Denver. Now we're building fast alongside executive teams across government and enterprise.

We are a StartX accelerator company and work in-person at StartupHQ in San Francisco.

Why Join Us

• Build AI for decision-makers — you’ll be able to point to real leaders – mayors, congressmen, CEOs – and know your work helped power offices that impact millions
• Own the intelligence layer from day one — not just prompts, but the systems that turn messy executive context into reasoning, briefings, and decisions
• True founding ownership — ship end-to-end, work directly with customers, and help define the technical DNA of the company

The Role

We’re hiring a Founding Engineer to build the AI-native operating system for modern leadership. You’ll work directly with the CEO and founding team to ship features, design core systems, and solve real-world problems for high-stakes teams.

You’ll touch everything – backend, frontend, AI, infrastructure, and security – shaping product direction and engineering culture from day one. If you thrive in ambiguity and love shipping fast, this role is for you.

What You’ll Do

Within weeks:

• Ship core agentic workflows that executive teams rely on day-to-day
• Use ingestion and structuring of data to create actionable context
• Work directly with customers to understand how their offices operate and where Chief can embed in their daily workflows

Within months:

• Help shape Chief’s core architecture and AI workflows for executive reasoning and decision-making
• Build upon personalization and intelligence used across briefings, tasks, and relationships
• Prototype and iterate with voice-to-text, surfacing recommendations, and more

Who You Are

• 4+ years of experience shipping full-stack, production-grade products
• Early-stage startup experience building 0 to 1.
• Strong Python + Typescript + React experience
• Hands-on experience building AI-native features (LLMs, agents, RAG, embeddings)
• Fluent using AI across product development – prototyping, coding, testing
• Product-driven and customer-obsessed
• Bonus: experience working with government or regulated industries
• U.S. citizen eligible for security clearance

Compensation

• Title: Founding Engineer
• Salary: $150 - $180K
• Equity: Meaningful early-stage ownership
• Benefits: Health insurance