Founding Software Engineer

W26 San Francisco, CA Full-Time 2 Positions Founding Software Engineer Join a three-person founding team from Stanford, MIT, and UC Berkeley. Build the AI-native platform that top-10 pharmaceutical companies depend on to advance the right drug candidates and stop the wrong ones early. All backgrounds welcomed. No scientific background required. Apply Now founding-engineer — 10x-science $cat opportunity.json { "role": "Founding Software Engineer", "positions": 2, "team": "3 scientist-founders → 5", "stage": "Revenue — multiple top-10 pharma customers", "backed_by": "Y Combinator (W26)", "origin": "Laboratory of Prof. Carolyn Bertozzi (2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry)" } $echo $IMPACT The code you write will directly determine whether a drug candidate advances or gets stopped: decisions worth hundreds of millions of dollars and, downstream, the patients waiting for those medicines. $ WHY THIS ROLE The highest-leverage work of your career 01 Genuinely novel problems The systems you build will process data that no existing software can handle at the speed and accuracy our customers require. You will write fundamental algorithms, architect performance-critical infrastructure, and ship code that reaches production weekly. 02 Direct founder collaboration You will pair-program directly with the founders on bare-metal, high-throughput, AI-native software. No PMs, no specs handed down. You will translate deep scientific domain knowledge into production software together. 03 Immediate customer impact You will be founding engineer #1 or #2 at a company selling to the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. That is rare at this stage. Your code ships to enterprise customers and iterates on real-world feedback. THE TEAM The only team in the world that can solve this problem We built the field of next-generation protein characterization out of Carolyn Bertozzi's Nobel laureate lab at Stanford. No one had turned it into software until now. David Roberts, Ph.D. CEO Stanford postdoctoral scholar and Damon Runyon Cancer Research Fellow. 15+ years on the science this platform automates, with foundational publications across Nature, JACS, and other leading journals. Andrew Reiter COO Trained at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where he built the analytical tools pharma uses to understand how drugs bind their targets, before joining the Bertozzi lab at Stanford. Vishnu Tejus CTO 2x YC founder. Founding engineer at Nooks, helped scale them through their Series B. Built foundational protein characterization technology at Stanford. Developed by researchers at WHAT YOU'LL DO Build from first principles Build and own core modules of a high-performance scientific computing platform from first principles Architect systems for throughput, correctness, and scale across large and complex datasets Work directly with the founding team to translate deep scientific domain knowledge into production software Deploy to enterprise pharmaceutical customers and iterate based on real-world feedback Make foundational technical decisions that will define the platform for years to come YOU WILL SUCCEED IF YOU HAVE THESE SKILLS 01 Low-level systems architecture You know how to architect low-level systems in Rust. It could be writing novel kernels because you were fed up with PyTorch, or a library for processing a web app's data. Comfortable with C, C++, or Go? You don't need to learn Rust syntax before meeting with us. 02 Compute-performance intuition You have a sense for when to apply zero-parameter, zero-time leverage (XSA, Partial RoPE, Late QAT) versus forcing the silicon to reveal its absolute limits by benchmarking compilers and GPUs. 03 Obsessed with interpretability You care deeply about understanding why a system behaves the way it does, not just that it works. 04 Leverage the best available tools You adopt AI coding agents, CLI tooling, and anything else that multiplies your output. The speed at which you incorporate new tools into your workflow is a competitive advantage. 05 Learn like a sponge