Founding Engineer

Job Title:

Founding Engineer

Location-Type:

Remote

Start Date Is:

2-3 weeks from offer

Duration:

Direct Hire

Compensation Range:

150-170k Equity

About Surround Sound Media:

Surround Sound Media is an AI-native platform rebuilding local journalism across America. They autonomously collect, structure, and publish hyper-local news for communities that have lost their newsrooms — covering local government, schools, businesses, and sports from a single intelligent platform. With $7M raised, $2.7M in ARR, and a roadmap to scale from dozens of outlets to thousands, they're solving hard engineering problems at the intersection of AI and civic impact.

Your Responsibilities:

• Build the data ingestion layer: scrape, parse, and structure data from local government records, public feeds, and hundreds of local sources at scale
• Design and implement multi-agent agentic workflows for entity extraction, article generation, and research automation using LLMs
• Deploy and manage cloud infrastructure on AWS — set up services, write Terraform, build and maintain CI/CD pipelines
• Build prompt regression testing and LLM output evaluation pipelines to ensure factual accuracy and consistency in production
• Own reliability: when something breaks in production, you're one of two engineers who can fix it — and you own that responsibility
• Work directly with the CTO and CEO, context-switching between deep technical depth and business conversations
• Make product calls when needed — you're figuring out what to build and why, not just executing tickets

Requirements:

• 4–8 years of software engineering experience with a core strength in backend Python: async frameworks, task queues, and PostgreSQL
• Hands-on AWS experience — you've set up services, written Terraform, and debugged CI/CD pipelines (not necessarily a DevOps specialist, but not afraid of it)
• Production LLM experience: you've shipped real agentic applications — multi-agent orchestration, entity extraction, LLM output evaluation — in production, not just prototypes
• AI coding tool fluency: you actively use Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or equivalent as a core part of your daily workflow — this is non-negotiable
• Proven self-direction: you figure out what needs to be built and build it — you don't wait for a perfectly scoped ticket
• At least one tenure of 3 years at a single employer, OR an active track record of side projects if coming from a large company
• Clear, articulate answer for why you want to be a founding engineer at an early-stage startup right now