Founding Engineer
ORIGAMICS is hiring a Founding Engineer in San Francisco, United States. Level rates it ; you can apply on ORIGAMICS.
Level's read on this job
- Builds AI ●●●● is how Level rates this role: the job is building AI systems.
- Tools and skills the posting cites include Python, CI/CD and AI research.
- Level classifies it as a senior role.
- Level lists 1 other open role at ORIGAMICS.
AI in this role
Build custom in-house physics-informed AI models and core product architecture to automate hardware and circuit board design.
Origamics AI · Founding team · Full-time
We're hiring the first engineers to join the founders. Not employee #20. Not "early." Founding.
What we do
The technology used to design boards and electronics is some of the most complex in existence, and it hasn't changed much in decades. Engineers spend enormous amounts of time on setup, scripting, debugging failures, and waiting on runs that take hours or days. A single board program can drag on for 9 to 12 months, mostly because nobody catches a problem with the board until physical testing. By then it's late, and it's expensive to fix.
General-purpose AI and LLMs don't understand circuit physics, so we're building our own models in-house, from the ground up, trained specifically on how signals and fields actually behave on a board. We take schematics straight from the tools engineers already use, run our AI to generate fabrication-ready boards, and hand them back. No rip-and-replace, no throwing away twenty years of muscle memory.
Our vision is simple to say and hard to build: hardware design should move at the speed of software. Chips and boards aren't easy, but the tools around them just haven't kept pace with everything else.
We're a very small technical team by design. We've grown a company from pre-product to nine figures in annual revenue, and grown engineering orgs from 3 people to 50. We've published AI research with real citations behind it and hold multiple patents. We're now hiring the founding engineers on our team —* not the fortieth —* and you'd be building next to us from day one.
What you'll own
The product architecture, services and storage solutions end-to-end, with nobody between your decision and production.
Technical stack and productivity tools, selecting key vendors in our technical stack and contributing to the developer flow, from agentic systems to reliable CI processes.
Integrations with engineering tools and services our customers already run, hardened enough that switching to us feels like nothing changed.
Turning our research team's physics-informed models into production systems engineers trust with real boards.
Design the agentic engineering practices this company runs on internally —* the tooling and workflows that let a two-person team ship like a twenty-person team.
Set the engineering bar for every hire that comes after you, because for a while, we will be the bar.
You might thrive if you...
Have taken something from zero to one before and you want to do it again — this time with the equity, ownership, and title to match what you're actually doing.
Understand the real trade-offs in storage, compute, and system architecture and optimize for the problem in hand vs the best theoretical solution.
Have a good approach in build vs buy decisions and understand software maintenance costs, and scaling complexities.
Have experience with —* or are eager to grow into —* agentic systems: dedicated containers, multi-agent orchestration, agent review, multi-model task distribution.
Like the idea of getting fluent, fast, in building foundational models (not just wrappers) alongside a PhD-heavy research team, even though it's not your background yet.
Email signal@origamics.com. Tell us the hardest system you've built and why it mattered. We read every one of them.
* human generated em dash
How we rate this
Founding Engineer at ORIGAMICS rates 90 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Questions you could be asked
- Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
- Tell me about a project where machine learning was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where system architecture was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where physics informed neural networks was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where hardware design was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: AI Research, Machine learning, System Architecture, Physics Informed Neural Networks, and Hardware Design. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.
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