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Salary: USD 150,000 - 200,000 / annual
Ardent is building data infrastructure for AI agents, focused on a novel primitive: branching. The core product enables developers and agents to clone terabyte-scale PostgreSQL databases in under 6 seconds, allowing coding agents to test generated code against production-like environments safely and cheaply. The founding team includes Vikram Chennai (founder, who previously scaled an AI Data Engineer to $200K ARR) and Evan (CTO with 20 years in data infrastructure at Netflix, Mailchimp, and Capital One). The company is backed by Y Combinator, Crane, Active Capital, and founders from core data infrastructure companies like Atlan.
As a Founding Engineer - Product, you'll be a core technical contributor working across the full stack on a small, SF-based team. You'll own multiple critical areas: rebuilding the onboarding experience to get customers from signup to their first production database branch in under 10 minutes; designing and shipping the agent interface for branching across MCP, API, and SDKs so agents can create, test, and tear down branches autonomously; building backend infrastructure to handle branch state at scale (millions of branches monthly); and owning the connection experience so any standard PostgreSQL client works seamlessly with just a connection string.
You'll work on challenges spanning low-level Go bugs, PostgreSQL compute scaling, storage branching and merges, reliability at scale, and UX design. You'll engage directly with customers from day one to shape the product. This is a full-stack role requiring strong computer science fundamentals, architecture design skills, and the ability to wear many hats. You should have shipped developer-facing products quickly, be comfortable with Go and PostgreSQL, and have strong product taste—the ability to recognize when a flow is wrong before customers tell you. The team works 5-6 days per week.
