Founding Engineer: Build the AI Headhunter

Superposition is the AI headhunter for startup founders. This isn't just a tool to sift through LinkedIn; it’s an autonomous agent that does the entire job—understanding who you need, sourcing bespoke candidates in real time, and delivering better matches than the sum of all human recruiters.

Our first customers get a simple experience: a voice agent that conducts a deep, consultative intake, calibrates live with example candidates, and deploys a suite of sourcing agents to bring back matches in days, not weeks. They’re betting their runway on better-matched talent, and it’s working. We have early traction, funding from the same investors behind Hugging Face and Loom, and founders referring us before they’ve even made a hire because the quality is that high.

We are the first employee at a venture-backed startup. We built the MVP, moved into Betaworks in Manhattan, and are now hiring our first human teammate.

Why this is possible now (and why us)

Most AI recruiting startups start from the tech. We’re starting from a scar.

I (Edmund) was a recruiter for 7 years. I placed engineer #1 at Brex and worked with teams like Mercury and Gemini during their early days. I learned to code, thinking it would make me a 10x recruiter (I was wrong), then moved into product. My cofounder Li was the first employee at Vitable Health (YC S20), grew it to $10M ARR with a four-person engineering team, and earned his master’s from CMU.

We understand recruiting as a craft, not just a workflow. We’re building the agent that outperforms all recruiters, including our former selves. The wedge is startup founders—they feel the pain of a bad hire existentially, and they trust systems that ship.

What we admire and why it matters:

• Notion for tasteful simplicity that hides immense complexity.
• Loom for creating a new, sticky modality (like voice) that becomes your default.
• PostHog & Rippling for tearing down silos and building the whole job-to-be-done from first principles.

This is the mindset we’re building with.

What you’ll do

As our first hire, you will take outsized ownership over entire products from zero.

In your first 60 days, you’ll likely:

• Build and refine the core agent system that learns from every founder and candidate interaction, turning conversations into higher-fidelity matches.
• Design and implement evaluation frameworks to expand our offering from engineering roles to sales, marketing, and customer success.
• Ship the delightful interfaces and infrastructure that make our voice-led, real-time calibration feel like magic.
• Talk directly to customers (the founders of future unicorns) and push code daily.

How you’ll spend your time:

• ~60% Building & Shipping: Full-stack product engineering with modern AI tooling. You’ll be comfortable reviewing PRs heavily generated with LLMs and building the scaffolding to improve their output.
• ~20% Systems Thinking: Designing agentic architectures—context, memory, evals, parallel execution—and integrating with third-party systems (ATS, calendar, Slack).
• ~20% Customer & Product: Talking to founders, understanding their pain, and closing the feedback loop fast.

You’ll report directly to the founders and work alongside us, in person, every day.

Who you are

You are not looking for a ticket queue. You want a singularly ambitious goal and the autonomy to chase it.

The hard proxies we look for:

• 2+ years of professional software engineering experience where you’ve shipped features with direct customer impact.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs and agentic systems. You’ve built with them, have opinions about context and evals, and probably have a blog post or open-source project to show for it.
• 0→1 founder-level execution. You’ve taken products from scratch to launch in high-ambiguity environments, likely as a founder or an early engineer at a VC-backed startup.
• Location: Onsite, 5 days a week at Betaworks in Manhattan, New York. We are a high-bandwidth, in-person team.

The deeper traits we care about:

• Super Agent Pilled: You have a deep conviction that AI agents can and should outperform humans on complex knowledge tasks. You’re a macro-optimist about the future and a micro-pessimist about today’s limitations.
• Swings for the Fences: Your career is defined by bold bets—founding, major career pivots, immigrating for opportunity—not incremental moves.
• High Agency: You work without being told what to do, pull on threads proactively, and expand your scope over time.
• First-Principles Thinker: You deconstruct complex domains (like hiring) from scratch and design cleaner systems, avoiding “happy ears” and the status quo.
• Futurist: You’re genuinely excited about BCI, quantum computing, space, and androids, and believe in a Star Trek-esque, post-scarcity future. You read Foundation.
• Uniquely Intense: You have a hobby or pursuit you’ve taken to a quasi-professional level. (Edmund will talk at you about the physics of pour-over coffee; Li is an interior designer at heart. We look forward to hearing about your weird thing.)

Logistics & Benefits

• Location: Onsite, 5 days/week at Betaworks in Manhattan, NYC.
• Visa Sponsorship: Available. We’re both immigrants and are long on New York.
• Compensation:
  • Base: $170,000 – $200,000
  • Equity: 1.0%
• Benefits:
  • Premium health, vision, dental (platinum plan for you, spouse, and kids).
  • Life insurance, untracked PTO, unlimited transportation budget.
  • Paid gym membership & trainer once a week.
  • Cleaner & laundry service, all meals at the office covered.
  • An angel check when you start your own startup.

Interview Process

We want to respect your time and make this feel like working together, not an interrogation.

1. Intro Call (30 min) with Edmund.
2. Technical Call (30 min) with Li (likely to run over if you both start geeking out).
3. Technical Assessment: Work on this async or come spend a day building in person with us.
4. Technical Debrief (60 min) with Li.
5. Culture & Fit (60 min) with Edmund. (We can roll steps 3-5 into one super day if you prefer.)

Apply

If this reads like a description written specifically for you, we should talk.

Apply here: [Application Link]

We are building the de facto way startups hire. Let’s get to work.