The Role
Join as an early engineer owning major product areas end-to-end. Build cloud IDE surfaces, design systems for autonomous agents to write/test/ship code, iterate with founders and customers, and set engineering standards and culture.
Summary Generated by Built In
About Ara
Ara is building the cloud coding agent: an autonomous software engineer that turns a trigger into a pull request and reports back in Slack and Linear. We're a YC company (P26) based in San Francisco, moving fast to redefine how software gets built.
The role
As a Founding Engineer, you'll be one of the first engineers at Ara. You'll own major parts of the product end-to-end, from the cloud IDE and interactive prompting to the autonomous agent that ships code on its own. You'll set the technical direction, ship daily, and directly shape both the product and the culture.
What you'll do
- Build and own core product surfaces across the full stack
- Design the systems that let autonomous agents write, test, and ship real code
- Work directly with the founders and early customers to iterate fast
- Set engineering standards, tooling, and culture as we scale the team
What we're looking for
- Strong engineering fundamentals and a bias toward shipping
- Experience building products end-to-end (frontend, backend, or infra)
- Excitement about AI agents, developer tools, and the future of software
- Comfort with ambiguity and ownership in an early-stage environment
Details
- Location: San Francisco (in office)
- Employment: Full-time
- Compensation: competitive salary plus meaningful founding equity
If you want to build the tool that builds software, we'd love to talk.
CompensationThe base pay range for this role is $10,000 – $10,000 per month.
Skills Required
- Strong engineering fundamentals and a bias toward shipping
- Experience building products end-to-end (frontend, backend, or infra)
- Excitement about AI agents, developer tools, and the future of software
- Comfort with ambiguity and ownership in an early-stage environment
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The Company
What We Do
Ara is a proactive software engineer and self-driving IDE that automatically identifies and ships improvements to a codebase in a continuous loop. By reading the product and codebase, Ara spots high-value next steps and executes them end-to-end—editing files, driving the browser and terminal, and opening pull requests—without requiring constant prompts from the user.
