Founding Engineer (2+ years)
Vantara AI
San Francisco, CA, USA
USD 200k-200k / year + Equity
Posted on Jun 17, 2025
Founding Engineer (2+ years)
San Francisco
Engineering
In office
Full-time
Compensation
1-3% equity, up to $200k in cash compensation.
What We Do
Writing code is easier than ever. Building software that users love still requires knowing what they actually need - which means choosing between gut instinct or tedious analysis. Vantara automatically synthesizes user behavior and feedback to give product teams a clear, prioritized list of what their coding agents should build next. This frees teams to focus on shipping new features instead of constantly making incremental improvements to existing ones. We aren’t talking publicly about what we’re building just yet but would love to share more with you.
Who We Are
Team
- Raghav Sethi has built distributed systems that ran on ~70,000 machines at Meta. He was a tech/product lead for Presto - Meta’s primary SQL analytics engine. At Airtable, he worked across infrastructure and product engineering. He re-engineered the core database structures for 10x scale and led three major new product initiatives. He is obsessed with customer feedback, and shipped multiple #1 feature requests and personally triaged ~9000 feedback entries. His final role at Airtable was leading the AI team, where he launched Airtable’s first 5 AI features along with a new pricing model.
- Rohan Katyal has led 0 to 1 product launches and built systems that scaled to global impact. At Meta, he launched Meta Verified the company’s first subscription product, and helped scale it to millions in ARR in under a year. He also led business messaging growth on WhatsApp, taking it from early traction to over $1B ARR. At Yelp, he built the company’s experimentation platform, now an Harvard Business School case study. He also verticalized the local services marketplace, accelerating growth that now accounts for the majority of company revenue. His work spans establishing new products, growth, and monetization.
The founders have been close friends since undergrad.
Stage
We have an initial version of the product deployed to a select group of design partners, and are co-building the product with them. We are backed by South Park Commons, Homebrew, and top tier angels.
Logistics
- We are located in SF and work from the office 4 days/week.
- Candidates must have existing U.S. work authorization. We can sponsor visa transfers (e.g., H-1B), but cannot support new visa applications at this time.
Values
- Obsess over customers — we dive deep to understand their workflows and pain points.
- Work like it’s a marathon — we push hard, but pace ourselves for the long game.
- Detail-driven where it counts — we sweat the critical stuff and move fast on everything else.
- Live in the future — we’re building for the next generation of AI-native companies, we need to operate one step ahead of them.
Who You Are
You are the kind of person that is interested in founding your own company but have been held back because you don’t yet have the right idea, cofounder or logistics in place. You have considered joining a very early-stage startup but decided that the risk-reward ratio isn’t worth it.
We feel you - we think that early employees are critical to the company’s success and usually aren’t rewarded appropriately. We offer top-of-the-market equity grants (over 5x the median) and cash compensation in the top 10% of the market. We don’t think this is being generous - we think this is being fair to talented folks that have plenty of great options.
Requirements
- You have a CS degree from a top university and 2+ years of industry experience OR 4+ years of industry experience.
- You’ve written Typescript in production.
- You’ve worked with LLMs either at day job or in your side projects.
- You’re energized by the open questions and whitespace that exists in the early days of building a product and company.
- You’re rarely blocked: you learn new skills on the fly to get the job done.
Process
We will have 2 screening interviews, one in-person and one remote. These interviews will test real-world problem solving and should need no advance preparation. Finally, we will want to spend at least 2 days (and ideally more) working together on a real-world project in Typescript or Python. You will be compensated for your time.
First name *
Last name *
Email *
LinkedIn URL *
Location *
Resume *
Click to upload or drag and drop here
By applying you agree to Gem's terms and privacy policy.
Save your info to apply to other roles faster & help employers reach you.
Req ID: R2