Job Description
About Settle Settle is an AI-native enterprise data migration platform. We replace the manual schema mapping, transformation, and validation work that consulting firms do by hand today with an AI system built on a single principle: AI proposes, deterministic engines validate, humans approve. The opportunity We're hiring the person who'll own the technical side of the company alongside the founder. Co-founder economics, CTO scope, full ownership of agent architecture and engineering culture from day one. This role is sometimes called Founding Engineer at other companies. We use Co-Founder & CTO because the equity (15–25%), scope (full technical ownership), and authority match that altitude — not the IC-with-fancy-title connotation Founding Engineer often carries. If you've shipped LLM systems in production, care about correctness more than novelty, and want to build the system that makes enterprise data migration finally work — let's talk. What you'll own Phase 3 agent architecture — design and ship the agent loop, decomposition strategy, eval harness, and validation pipeline. The next 3–6 months. Engineering strategy — own technical direction, infrastructure decisions, and architectural choices as we scale. Enterprise security and compliance — be the technical face in customer security reviews. Drive SOC 2 prep post-seed. Hiring and team building — recruit and lead the engineering team as we grow from two to ten. Customer and product — partner with the founder on product strategy, talk directly to customers, and shape the roadmap. This role is not for someone who wants to write code in isolation. It's for someone who wants to build a company. Who you are Must-have: 5–9 years of engineering experience, with 3+ years shipping production systems used by real customers Production LLM or agent system experience — has built and deployed applications using LLM APIs in production. Knows prompt engineering, structured outputs, retries, evaluation. Non-negotiable. Strong backend and data fundamentals — Postgres at depth, schema design, SQL, async/queue patterns, idempotency TypeScript proficient. Next.js or Node ideal. Has shipped to paying customers, not just side projects Strong preference: Background in data engineering, integration, migration, or ETL — alumni from Snowflake, Databricks, Airbyte, dbt Labs, Fivetran, Mulesoft, Workato, Informatica, or Talend will understand the problem viscerally Enterprise SaaS instincts — already knows what SSO, RBAC, audit logs, and SOC 2 mean and why they matter Has built eval frameworks (Braintrust, Langfuse, or homegrown) — Phase 3 success depends on this Production cloud experience — has shipped and operated cloud-native applications in AWS, GCP, Azure, or modern PaaS Cultural fit: Investigation-first — you read code before changing it Comfortable presenting in enterprise security reviews High agency, can decide and ship without direction Direct communicator — corporate-comms styles won't fit What we offer Title: Co-Founder & CTO Equity: 15–25% common stock. 4-year vest, 1-year cliff. Cash: $100K–$150K base. Salary ramps to $200K–$300K on close of next institutional round. Optional structure: part of equity can be milestone-based for upside alignment Location: NYC. In-person. Stage: Pre-seed closing. In the Antler residency. One paying enterprise customer live, multiple in pipeline. How to apply Click Apply to submit your application. The application takes about 10 minutes and includes short screening questions on your production LLM experience, data pipeline work, and motivation. We respond to every application within 3 business days. Strong candidates get a 30-minute call within a week.