The mandate: Build the internal AI systems that let 50 people run an $80M company. Production-grade agents, workflows, and automations across recruiting, security and compliance, finance operations, customer onboarding, and GTM — reporting into a cross-functional team that works directly with the founders. The framing that matters: this is not a support or ops-tooling job despite the subject matter. The JD is explicit — "This is not a narrowly scoped role, it is a high-ownership builder position." You're an engineer whose product is the company's own operating leverage, sitting with the founders on whatever is highest-priority. It's the closest thing to a founding-team seat that isn't a founder title. What You'll Own HR and recruiting AI
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Structured signal extraction from résumés — skills, experience, founder traits, domain expertise
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Lead scoring models predicting interview success and role fit
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AI recruiter workflows for screening and qualification
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Personalized outbound and candidate engagement automation Security and compliance
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Automation for BAAs, DPAs, DocuSign, and contract review flows
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Security questionnaire and compliance response generation
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Internal tooling for enterprise readiness and audit Operational infrastructure
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Accounts receivable automation and finance email workflows
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Automated enterprise onboarding and account setup
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Systems that cut manual overhead across teams Integrations and platform
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Salesforce, HubSpot, GoHighLevel
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Zapier, n8n, Make
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LLM systems on OpenAI, Gemini, Claude, and others
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API integrations connecting internal systems GTM engineering
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HubSpot and Lark automations for sales and marketing efficiency
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Lifecycle automation for engagement and retention
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Website personalization and ad content generation
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Email personalization and outbound pipelines at scale Requirements Hard gates:
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Bachelor's in CS, CE, or a closely related technical field. Stated as a requirement — the only Retell engineering req that doesn't offer an "or equivalent experience" escape. Confirm whether it's firm.
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2+ years professional software engineering. Real engineering, backend/full-stack/systems.
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1+ year startup experience with demonstrated comfort in ambiguity
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Hands-on production LLM or AI agent work. Not prototypes — systems that ran and that people depended on.
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Comfortable operating across product, engineering, and operations
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Redwood City (confirm on-site status) Profile:
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3–7 years total. Senior enough to build unsupervised, junior enough to want breadth over depth.
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Thinks like a founder, operates with high ownership
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Prefers building systems to executing defined tasks
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Cares about real-world impact over technical elegance Strong bonuses:
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Has shipped an agent system that touched money or hiring decisions. Highest-value signal — it means they've dealt with the reliability and trust problems agents actually have.
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GTM engineering or RevOps engineering background — HubSpot, Salesforce, Clay, Apollo, outbound automation at scale
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Internal tools or ops engineering at a fast-scaling startup
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Ex-founder, especially technical solo founders — the breadth requirement matches almost exactly
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Automation platform depth: Zapier, n8n, Make, Retool, Temporal, Airflow
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Contract, compliance, or document-workflow automation
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Evaluation and reliability work for LLM systems — knows when an agent is wrong and what to do about it Location and visa:
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Redwood City
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Sponsorship: Yes — H-1B, TN, L-1, E-3, F-1 (OPT/CPT), and O-1 Anti-patterns
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No-code automation specialists without real engineering. Zapier and n8n are named tools, not the job — the loop has a 90-minute coding round.
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Engineers whose LLM experience is API calls in a side project
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Deep specialists who want one problem for two years. The scope changes constantly.
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Anyone who needs a defined roadmap — this team works on whatever the founders decide matters most
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Ops or business analysts who write scripts
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People who'd feel demoted building internal systems. If "recruiting automation" reads as beneath them, they're the wrong hire.
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Big-company engineers with narrow, well-scoped ownership history Who Will Thrive Here
Someone who's built an agent that did a real job — screened candidates, chased invoices, filled out a security questionnaire — and got it reliable enough that people stopped checking its work. They're a strong engineer who's more interested in leverage than in craft for its own sake, they know their way around a CRM and an LLM API equally, and they want proximity to founders on the highest-priority problems. Technical ex-founders and early GTM-engineering hires at fast-scaling startups fit almost perfectly.