Founding Product Engineer

About Proliferate

Proliferate is the open, harness-agnostic platform for running coding agents — Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, whatever comes next — in parallel, locally and in the cloud. We think the next decade of software gets built by engineers directing fleets of agents, and that layer shouldn't belong to any one model vendor. We're building it.

We're backed by True Ventures, Pear VC, and 50+ YC founders, with plenty of money to keep building through rough patches. We work in person in SoMa, San Francisco.

About me, the founder

I'm Pablo. I finished my master's in AI at 19, joined Onyx (YC W24) as engineer #1, spent a year building enterprise AI search, then started Proliferate. You'd be hire #1- we'd work side by side every day, and there is a lot of room to grow.

How we work

• We ship unusually fast- our launch week was seven launches in seven days.
• Tiny team, absurd ownership: you will build core pieces of product end to end.
• We take health extremely seriously, for real: company-expensed Whoop, wellness stipend, all meals covered, top-tier insurance- and a culture that treats sleep, training, and building a good life as tenets of a good company culture.

Example work

• Build a new core workflow end to end across agent runtime, product UI, and cloud infrastructure.
• Design a new interface for human-agent collaboration made possible by a model capability that landed last week (or earlier today).
• Turn a rough customer pain point into a polished product surface in days.
• Re-think how engineering teams review, redirect, and trust agent work before merge.

You might be a great fit if

• You've shipped products 0→1 and have strong opinions about software
• You use AI tools conscientiously- and have real takes about where they fail
• You want a role unusually dense in learning, ownership, and pace
• You care deeply about what you build and who you build it with

Things we DON'T care much about

• Experience with our stack (TypeScript, React, Rust, Postgres, AWS- you'll pick it up)
• AI/ML research background- we're looking for excellent software engineers
• Years of experience. New grads welcome; the work trial is the resume.

Compensation

For exceptional people, we're happy to be exceptional- especially on equity.

Interview process

1. 15-minute call with Pablo
2. 30-minute technical conversation with a codebase open on your end
3. Paid work trial- 1-3 days, $1-3K
4. References + offer