Location
New York, New York
Salary
$200,000 - $400,000
Type
Full-Time
TL;DR
- Distributed systems
- Agent reliability and security
- Independent technical ownership
- Shape architecture from inception
About Unbounded
We’re a stealth, seed-stage AI company building a growth operating system for large institutions. Our ambition goes beyond automating individual tasks: we want to help organizations grow faster by enabling AI to carry out complex work across teams, systems, and industries.
We’re tackling the foundations that requires—reliable, secure agents that work over long time horizons, open models that learn how people work, and infrastructure with the potential to become standalone developer products.
Our founder previously founded Sardine, which raised $200M from investors including GV and a16z and surpassed $100M in revenue, growing 2×. His background also includes Revolut, PIMCO, and founding an NLP company in 2013.
Join at the beginning to shape the architecture, products, and team behind a company built for the long term.
About This Role
We’re building a growth operating system that helps large institutions grow faster. Our first engineering hires will establish the technical foundations for AI agents that can carry out complex work reliably across teams, systems, and industries.
You will own the infrastructure that enables long-running agents to operate securely and repeatably. The focus is on building horizontal systems that support our own products and could eventually become developer infrastructure used by others.
What You'll Own
- Design and build infrastructure for reliable, secure, long-running agents.
- Develop execution, state management, and recovery systems that keep workflows running through failures and interruptions.
- Build structured representations of problems, workflows, and the context agents need to act.
- Create automated and human evaluation systems to assess agent work and improve reliability.
- Establish permissions, observability, and debugging capabilities.
- Help shape the architecture and technical direction of the company.
Technical Requirements
- Experience building backend infrastructure, distributed systems, agent infrastructure, or workflow execution systems.
- Strong engineering fundamentals and the ability to reason about reliability, security, and performance.
- Ability to design scalable systems and diagnose failures across system boundaries.
- Understanding of the challenges involved in maintaining state and executing work over long time horizons.
Execution and Ownership
- Own problems from initial design through implementation and deployment.
- Make technical decisions and move work forward without a prescribed structure.
- Work directly with the founder and collaborate across model development and developer infrastructure.
- Work in person 5 days per week, with New York preferred; San Francisco or Toronto may be considered.
Background
- Around 2–3 years of relevant experience is the target; demonstrated ability matters more than tenure.
- Startup experience is preferred but not required.
- Educational background is flexible.
- Independent projects, open-source work, and entrepreneurial experience are relevant.
Nice to Have
- Experience with agent orchestration, durable execution, sandboxing, or workflow engines.
- Experience building infrastructure for enterprise or regulated environments.
- Experience serving demanding technical customers.
- Prior ownership of an infrastructure product or substantial open-source project.
Who Will Thrive Here You’re an entrepreneurial builder who enjoys understanding why systems fail and making them dependable. You can work independently, make thoughtful tradeoffs, and turn an open-ended technical problem into working infrastructure.
Job Details
Experience
2-5 Years
Salary
$200,000 - $400,000
Equity
1%
Visa Sponsorship
No
Employment Type
Full-Time
Work Arrangement
In office
Work Intensity
9-9-5
Benefits & Perks
Health
Dental
Vision
Green Flags
Infrastructure ownership at a developer-first company.
Experience with distributed systems, workflow engines, or agent runtimes.
Early startup experience with broad technical responsibility.
Red Flags
Cannot explain failure modes in systems they claim to own.
Treats retries as sufficient without considering duplicate actions or corrupted state.
Proposes broad agent access without considering permissions or isolation.
Candidate scorecard
· 7 criteriaExperience building distributed systems, backend infrastructure, workflow engines, or long-running agent systems.
Hands-on ownership of reliable execution, state management, failure recovery, security, or observability.
Demonstrated ability to design, deploy, and operate scalable infrastructure.