Ploy is building an AI-native growth engine for modern marketing teams — combining high-leverage product experiences with reliable, scalable systems.
We’re a small, fast-moving team shipping new product surfaces weekly and hardening them for real production traffic. If you enjoy building end-to-end products, sweating details, and scaling what you ship, you’ll fit in well.
The roleAs a Founding Engineer, you’ll work across the stack to build core product experiences and the systems behind them. You’ll partner closely with product and design, own projects from idea → shipped → scaled, and help shape the engineering culture and technical direction as we grow.
What you’ll doBuild 0→1 product features end-to-end: discovery, technical design, implementation, launch, and iteration.
Use the latest AI tools every day — build with them, push their limits, and learn alongside teammates doing the same.
Ship across the stack (web app, backend services, data, infrastructure) with a bias toward simple, durable systems.
Build product experiences with strong UX quality: interaction design, performance, and polish.
Design and operate systems that scale: reliability, observability, capacity planning, cost/performance trade-offs.
Improve our engineering foundations: architecture, tooling, CI, testing, release processes, and on-call hygiene.
Collaborate tightly with founders and teammates, turning ambiguous problems into crisp execution.
Strong track record building and shipping 0→1 products (startup, new product line, or major greenfield initiative).
Comfortable as a true full-stack engineer (front-end + backend), and willing to go wherever the work is.
Strong product sense: you can reason about user workflows, trade-offs, and “what matters” without needing perfect specs.
Design intuition: you care about craft, and you can implement clean UI with attention to detail.
Systems mindset: you enjoy making software fast, reliable, and maintainable as usage grows.
Experience scaling products and systems through inflection points (10× traffic, new customer segments, new pricing/billing complexity).
Experience with AI-powered products (LLMs, agentic systems, evaluation/observability, prompt/tooling pipelines).
Prior experience as an early engineer or founder in a high-ownership environment.
Experience in the web and marketing space
Small teams, high ownership, fast iteration.
Engineers own product: you’ll partner directly with design and founders, and have real agency over what we build and why.
Pragmatic engineering: ship quickly, then harden with the right abstractions.
We value clear thinking, taste, and accountability over ceremony.
Similar Jobs
What you need to know about the San Francisco Tech Scene
Key Facts About San Francisco Tech
- Number of Tech Workers: 365,500; 13.9% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
- Major Tech Employers: Google, Apple, Salesforce, Meta
- Key Industries: Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, fintech, consumer technology, software
- Funding Landscape: $50.5 billion in venture capital funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
- Notable Investors: Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins
- Research Centers and Universities: Stanford University; University of California, Berkeley; University of San Francisco; Santa Clara University; Ames Research Center; Center for AI Safety; California Institute for Regenerative Medicine


