Hiring · Senior founding role

Founding Member of Technical Staff, AI Infrastructure

Location: San Francisco / Bay Area preferred. Remote exceptional for the right person.

We look for fast learners with high agency, AI-native workflows, clear technical communication, and evidence-backed judgment first. Exact stack match is not required. If you can reason clearly, use AI tools to learn, prototype, debug, and ship faster, and own ambiguous work, we can teach specific tools.

Touchdown Labs helps teams make AI workloads cheaper and easier to own by turning inference behavior, traces, workload replay, GPU signals, and task-path evidence into reusable optimization artifacts.

Back to careers → Apply for this job →

Official role

Founding Member of Technical Staff, AI Infrastructure

Location: San Francisco / Bay Area preferred. Remote exceptional for the right person.

About the Role

This is a broad founding engineering role for a senior builder who can move through ambiguity, learn new systems quickly, and turn rough customer or research problems into durable product and infrastructure. You will work across product surfaces, backend systems, inference evidence, internal tools, and technical narratives. We care more about ownership, judgment, AI-native workflow, and evidence quality than exact stack overlap.

What You'll Do

  • Turn ambiguous company and customer problems into shipped technical work.
  • Work across product, backend, infrastructure, inference, evidence, and internal tooling as priorities change.
  • Use traces, profiles, workloads, and customer examples to ground decisions in evidence.
  • Create clear artifacts that help the team, customers, and partners understand what changed and why.
  • Own important projects end-to-end in a small founder-led team.

Skills and Qualifications

Minimum qualifications
  • Fast learner with high ownership, strong fundamentals, and comfort working across unfamiliar technical surfaces.
  • AI-native builder who uses AI tools to learn, prototype, debug, and ship faster without outsourcing judgment.
  • Evidence-backed operator who can connect claims to traces, code, measurements, artifacts, or customer-visible outcomes.
  • Strong systems or backend engineering experience.
  • Experience with Python, Rust, Go, C++, or similar production languages, or the ability to learn the needed tool quickly.
  • Track record of shipping ambiguous products or systems.
  • Ability to write clear technical explanations for engineers and business readers.
Preferred qualifications
  • Experience with inference or ML infrastructure.
  • Exposure to GPU systems, observability, devtools, or platform engineering.
  • Early-stage startup experience or similar zero-to-one ownership.

Logistics

  • Full-time founding role.
  • San Francisco / Bay Area preferred. Remote exceptional for the right person.
  • Details discussed during process.
Apply for this job →

When applying, select "Founding Member of Technical Staff, AI Infrastructure" in the Role or lane field.