Founding Engineer

expand.ai (Headquarters: San Francisco, CA)

Effect JavaScript TypeScript Backend FullStack AI Scraping DistributedSystems Full Stack Engineer Back End Engineer Staff Engineer

**About expand.ai:** expand.ai is a Y Combinator-backed startup building a foundational layer for the agent economy by turning the internet into a queryable database. We are tackling the critical challenge of data access for AI applications by creating reliable, high-quality web extraction agents. Our technology is essential for enabling data-driven decisions and powering the next generation of AI agents. With backing from top investors and a team led by Tim Suchanek (Founder) and Jonathan Powers (Founding Engineer), we are scaling our engineering infrastructure to handle millions of web pages. We work 6 days a week in our San Francisco office and are committed to making a massive impact on the AI ecosystem.

**About The Role:** We are looking for a Founding Engineer to join our early engineering team. This role is critical in shaping the core infrastructure of our platform, which involves building and scaling highly dynamic web extraction agents. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in backend and full-stack engineering, machine learning, and distributed systems. You will be responsible for designing and implementing the core architecture for web extraction agents, building scalable and reliable data pipelines, and coordinating with AI researchers to integrate the latest advancements in AI models.

**Key Responsibilities:**
- Design and implement the core architecture for web extraction agents using modern programming languages and frameworks
- Build scalable and reliable data pipelines to ensure high-quality data extraction from millions of websites
- Coordinate with AI researchers to integrate the latest advancements in AI models for web extraction
- Develop and maintain the system's infrastructure to handle millions of web pages with minimal latency
- Create and optimize extraction models using the latest AI techniques
- Implement "secure by default" network systems in collaboration with security teams
- Engage with customers and internal teams to understand business requirements and deliver innovative solutions
- Mentor and guide engineers, sharing best practices and design principles for building reliable and scalable web extraction systems

**Required Skills and Ideal Candidate:**
- Proven experience leading complex engineering efforts focused on web scraping, data extraction, and distributed systems
- Exceptional collaboration and communication skills, with a demonstrated ability to align stakeholders and lead cross-functional teams
- A track record of contributing to long-term technical roadmaps and making thoughtful system-level tradeoffs
- At least 8+ years of coding experience in languages like JavaScript, TypeScript, or Go, with strong expertise in writing concurrent and distributed code
- Extensive experience designing and building distributed systems, leveraging concurrency primitives, and optimizing network performance
- Deep expertise in web scraping and data extraction systems, with familiarity across adjacent infrastructure domains
- Hands-on experience with cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, and the ability to optimize cost, performance, and scalability
- A strong sense of ownership and the ability to balance short-term priorities with long-term strategic goals
- Familiarity with the Effect programming language and its ecosystem
- Experience working with AI/ML models for data extraction and processing
- Passion for solving challenging technical problems and contributing to the agent economy ecosystem