Location
San Francisco, California
Salary
$150,000 - $300,000
Type
Full-Time
About Vulcan
Vulcan is a YC S25 GovTech/AI startup based in Austin, founded by Tanner Jones (previous GovTech exit, turned down Harvard Law), Chris Minge (ex-Google ML infrastructure for Gemini and Waymo), and Aleksander Mekhanik (Dartmouth dropout). The company raised a $10.9M seed co-led by General Catalyst and Cubit Capital and recently secured another round at a $300M valuation lead by a tier 1 VC.
Vulcan is building an AI operating system for government, powered by a proprietary legal and regulatory database spanning 157 billion records. Its agents help governments draft regulations, automate permitting, and streamline operations, while helping enterprises navigate complex compliance requirements. Already deployed across numerous state agencies, including Virginia, Texas, and California, Vulcan has achieved FedRAMP Ready status and expanded into AI-powered application building and document workflows. The team is working in person in Austin, with an SF office opening soon for the technical team.
About This Role
Vulcan is hiring full-stack engineers to work on the platform. We're not writing any of the code by hand. We were using coding agents for all of that. The role is defined by AI-native shipping speed more than any specific stack knowledge. The stack is TypeScript-heavy (full-stack) with AWS infrastructure underneath, but the hire's core competitive advantage is their ability to orchestrate coding agents to ship at 10x normal engineer velocity.
What You'll Own
- Architect and orchestrate multi-agent systems across the platform
- Design agent coordination patterns for complex legal reasoning
- Build reliable, auditable agent pipelines for government and legal use cases
- Ship agent systems in production
- Full-stack ownership on TypeScript-heavy front-end and AWS-heavy infra UI/UX contribution
Requirements
- Deep understanding of LLM capabilities and orchestration patterns
- Strong Python and TypeScript
- Systems thinker
- US citizen
- 2-4 years of experience at startups or high-caliber team, open to more experienced if right shape
- Higher raw-intelligence bar than typical
Profile Tier 1 — Founder / Founding Engineer at a YC Startup Tier 2 — High-Bar Startups Tier 3 — Austin Legal / GovTech AI Engineers
Strong Bonuses
- Open-source agent framework contributions — LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, OpenAI Swarm, DSPy, Instructor, LlamaIndex, Devin community, contributor to any multi-agent framework
- Multi-step reasoning and tool-use architectures shipped in production
- Legal tech or govtech experience
- UI/UX sensibility
- Prior founding engineer / early-team experience at a company that grew
- AI voting agents / parallel agent orchestration experience
- Personal side project / demo showing multi-agent orchestration at production quality
Job Details
Experience
2-4 years
Salary
$150,000 - $300,000
Equity
0.2% - 0.8%
Visa Sponsorship
No
Employment Type
Full-Time
Work Arrangement
In office
Work Intensity
996
Benefits & Perks
Company Card
- Any Benefit A Candidate Needs
Green Flags
Ex-YC founder whose company grew
YC founding engineer at a company that reached Series A+
Ex-Harvey / Eve / Spellbook / Ironclad — legal AI
Red Flags
Big-tech FAANG career-tracker without startup / OSS signal
Consultancy background (TCS, Accenture, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant)
Pure ML researcher without production shipping
Candidate scorecard
· 10 criteria2-4 years experience at startups
Deep LLM orchestration and multi-agent architecture understanding
Strong Python and TypeScript