About Chief

Email is overloaded. It’s the central coordination layer for the most important business workflows. But it’s also a dumping ground for everything else.

Chief is an AI email agent built for people whose most important work happens in their email. It learns who and what matters to you, parses signal from noise, and helps you make faster, better decisions.

The role

As a founding engineer (first 2-3 team members), you’ll be responsible for helping to architect and build the infrastructure that powers Chief. You’ll work on things like secure email sync, reliable job processing for LLM agents, and hybrid (semantic+keyword+metadata) search.

What you'll do

• Own backend systems, end-to-end.
• Design and maintain scalable databases, APIs, and cloud infrastructure.
• Collaborate closely with the founding team to inform product strategy and influence user-facing features.
• Continuously improve performance, reliability, and security as we scale from prototype to beta and beyond.

Who you are

• Strong backend / full-stack engineering chops (Typescript/Node, SQL/PostgreSQL, API design).
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, serverless architectures, and robust CI/CD.
• Excitement about early-stage startups and the opportunity to build core systems from scratch.
• Interest in full-stack work and willingness to tackle whatever’s needed to ship a great product.
• Bonus: prior experience with LLMs and embeddings.

The team

• Before starting Chief, JB (founder / CEO) was an early product and software engineer at Airtable (first ~15 employees).
• We raised a $2M pre-seed round from Alana Goyal @ basecase and Chad Byers @ Susa Ventures, and Howie Liu (Airtable founder / CEO) is involved as a founding investor / advisor.
• We believe that a lean team of polymaths can punch well above their weight.

If you’re excited about building the core infrastructure to redefine how people engage with their most important work tool, we’d love to talk!