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Salary: USD 125,000 - 300,000 / annual
Hypercubic is building AI systems to understand, modernize, and rearchitect large-scale legacy applications, particularly COBOL and mainframe systems that power critical global infrastructure in banking, airlines, utilities, and insurance. The company addresses a massive problem: approximately 70% of Fortune 500 companies still rely on decades-old mainframe systems for mission-critical operations, yet the original engineers are retiring and documentation is sparse, leaving these systems frozen in time despite their importance.
As a Founding Software Engineer on the backend team, you will work directly with the CTO to design, prototype, and productionize AI-powered systems from first principles. This is a founding-stage role with meaningful ownership over architecture, product direction, and early engineering culture. You'll operate across multiple abstraction layers—from low-level system reasoning and program analysis to high-level agentic interactions and user-facing workflows.
Key responsibilities include: rapidly prototyping new concepts to validate ideas, shipping AI-driven features end-to-end from model interaction through user workflows, setting early engineering standards around testing and reliability, translating ambiguous problems into concrete experiments and working systems, leading architecture decisions with the CTO, and collaborating with subject matter experts and customers across diverse industries.
You should care deeply about product quality and impact, be comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity, and have a track record of moving fast in high-urgency environments. Strong fundamentals in systems thinking, feedback loops, and AI engineering are essential. Nice-to-have skills include strong testing practices (TDD, property-based testing), production experience with agentic or autonomous systems, exposure to legacy systems or compilers, and familiarity with enterprise software constraints.
The role is full-time, in-person in San Francisco. Hypercubic offers health, dental, vision benefits, PTO, and relocation support. H1B sponsorship is not available, but H1B transfers and OPT are supported.
