Founding Engineer

About Orpex

Orpex is building the infrastructure for AI-native service companies: an autonomous company-building platform that lets a one-person team orchestrate an agentic workforce and compete with a thousand-person agency. The vision is to become the Shopify for AI-native service companies, empowering the next generation of founders to launch and scale without headcount. Orpex closed a $2.7 million angel round in seven days and has a working product in closed beta, moving at speed toward a public release.

About the Role

This is the first engineering hire at Orpex, meaning you will set the technical foundation and make every architectural call that everyone who comes after you inherits. The founder has a clear go-to-market track record and a $2.7 million angel round in the bank; what Orpex needs now is a builder who can take a working closed-beta product and make it production-ready and publicly scalable. You will work directly with the founder, own the full stack end to end, and operate with total autonomy in a zero-playbook environment where the pace is intense and the scope is unlimited.

What You'll Own

Own the entire technical stack end to end, from architecture decisions and infrastructure choices through production deployment and ongoing reliability.

Take the existing closed-beta product and drive it to a publicly scalable release, rebuilding or extending whatever is needed to get there.

Design and ship production-grade agentic systems, including orchestration layers, long-running agent harnesses, and multi-tool coordination at scale.

Talk to early users and service-company customers directly, define what to build next, and ship it without waiting for a product brief.

Set the engineering standard, hiring bar, and technical culture that every future engineer will be onboarded into.

Operate as a full-stack product engineer across frontend, backend, and infrastructure as the scope demands.

Must-Have

World-class depth in at least one of: fullstack engineering with infrastructure scaling experience, AI and LLM and agent-building in production, or product and design and UI/UX.

Demonstrated ability to design and ship production-grade systems with real users, not theoretical prototypes or zero-user side projects.

High agency: able to define what to build, decide how to build it, and execute without a manager, a product brief, or a playbook.

At least one strong external signal of caliber: early engineering experience at a top AI or high-growth startup, prior founder or CTO or founding-engineer background, exceptional evidence of building difficult production-grade systems, or a top technical university such as Stanford, MIT, or ETH.

Extremely hands-on, technically deep, and genuinely excited about 0-to-1 building; not looking for corporate or management-heavy profiles.

Willing to work in-person in San Francisco, six days per week, at startup intensity.

Nice-to-Have

Prior founder, CTO, or founding-engineer experience at a fast-moving startup.

Experience at a high-growth, high-funding AI startup with strong hiring bars (examples: companies such as Listen Labs, Gumloop, or similarly credentialed early-stage teams).

Background building platforms or products where the end user is themselves a business operator or founder.

Background in European technical ecosystems (Austria, Germany, Switzerland) given the founder's network and planned second engineering hub.

VISA NOTE:

Open to J1 and work 18 months apprenticeship.