Founding Engineer

Workstream is a mission-driven company building the all-in-one HR payroll and hiring platform for managing the hourly workforce. There are 2.7 billion hourly workers making up 80% of the global workforce but this market has been heavily underserved by technology and deserves better. Workstream has been purpose-built for the hourly workforce from day one so that these businesses and their employees can thrive.

Our customers include leading brands from multiple sectors including Burger King Carls Jr./Hardees IHOP KFC and Culvers. We are a high growth series B company and quickly expanding our product portfolio to deliver on our vision. We are backed by legendary VCs and industry experts like Founders Fund BOND and Coatue.

Workstream is building AI-native services that deliver completed business outcomesmature service categories businesses already pay for delivered by AI agents plus a small human review layer at materially better margins than the traditional alternative. We are validating the first service now with design customers from our existing base. You will be the first engineering hire on the delivery team reporting to the Head of Delivery AI-Native Services.

This is a forward-deployed builder role. You will embed with design customers map their real workflows and build the production agents integrations evaluations and review tooling that turn that work into a reliable repeatable service. You will see your systems do real work with real consequences for real peopleand you will be on the hook when they misbehave.

You will not own pricing deal acceptance or the margin modelthose sit with the Head of Delivery and the Head of GTM. You will own the components: whether they work how they fail and how fast bespoke work becomes reusable.

This is a full-time hybrid position with 1 to 2 days a week in-office to support close cross-functional collaboration.

• Build and operate production agents and agentic workflows: orchestration tool use data connections deterministic logic state and permissions.
• Work forward-deployed with design customerssit in their workflow map the messy reality and build against live data.
• Build the evaluation harness: eval datasets from real customer work pre-launch thresholds regression suites and post-launch monitoring.
• Build the human-review layer: exception queues review tooling escalation paths and the tracing that makes every agent decision auditable.
• Run shadow-mode parallel runs against the customers existing process or provider and drive discrepancies to zero before go-live.
• Turn customer-specific work into reusable agents integrations and playbooksproductization is the default customization the exception.
• Handle production incidents end to end and feed every failure back into evals and controls so it cannot recur.
• Help set the technical bar as the team grows.

• You have personally built and operated at least one AI agent or agentic workflow in production. You can clearly explain how it worked where it failed how you evaluated it and what you kept deterministic or human-led.
• Strong engineering judgment across models orchestration APIs data and integrations permissions observability and evaluations.
• You have worked directly with customers or end usersdiscovery implementation or incident resolutionand communicate clearly with non-technical people.
• You can break a messy workflow into deterministic steps agentic decisions human judgment and exception pathsand define how each part will be tested.
• You care about keeping plausible but wrong AI output away from customers: grounded context constrained actions verification evals review monitoring.
• You thrive in zero-to-one ambiguity: shipping weekly owning outcomes and doing whatever the service needsincluding unglamorous review tooling and data plumbing.
• Exposure to a regulated domain (payroll payments tax benefits labor compliance) is a plus not a requirement.
• Demonstrated production experience matters more than title or years.

• A mission-driven and value-based company dedicated to empower deskless workers and local businesses
• An early employee opportunity at a Series B hyper-growth startup; work with the founding team and industry veterans to accelerate your career
• Competitive salary and equity
• Comprehensive health coverage: medical dental and vision. We pay 95% of your premiums for our employees and 85% for dependents
• In office amenities and stocked kitchen
• 401K Plan
• Pre-tax commuter benefits
• Flexible PTO

Know More About Workstream

• Information

  Workstream provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race color religion age sex national origin disability status genetics protected veteran status sexual orientation gender identity or expression or any other characteristic protected by federal state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment including recruiting hiring placement promotion termination layoff recall transfer leaves of absence compensation and training.

  We are committed to the full inclusion of all qualified individuals.