# Founding Engineer

**Tessera · Tel Aviv / Amsterdam · Full-time · Founding team**

One role, not five. Take the coordination layer from primitives to something real teams
depend on — and own every part of that path.

This is the founding engineering seat, not the co-founder search — see
`/careers/tech-cofounder` if that's the conversation you want instead.

Apply: https://tesserahq.live/apply?role=founding-engineer

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## Why this role exists

Most early companies split engineering into specialisms too early, then spend a year
coordinating the seams. We would rather hire one person who can hold the whole problem: the
data that makes behaviour legible, the services that make it reliable, the interface that
makes it steerable, and the customer deployment where all three meet reality.

You will not do all of it at once. You will do whichever part is currently in the way — and
you will be trusted to decide which part that is.

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## What you'll actually do

- **Build the substrate.** Turn raw activity from many agents into a queryable,
  trustworthy picture of what is happening across the organisation.
- **Make it hold up.** Services and deployment paths — cloud, gateway, on-prem — that stay
  honest when a customer's security team reads them closely.
- **Make trust computable.** Turn behavioural evidence into models small and fast enough to
  sit in the decision path, and evaluate them honestly rather than hopefully.
- **Make it steerable.** Design and build the surfaces where a human sees what the
  workforce is doing and redirects it without losing flow.
- **Take it to customers.** Sit inside design partner environments, watch it fail in ways
  it never fails locally, and bring that truth back into the product.

Nobody is excellent at all five. We expect real depth in one or two and genuine willingness
across the rest.

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## You might be a fit if

- You have shipped systems end to end and lived with the consequences of your own
  architecture.
- You are comfortable being the person who decides what to build, not only how to build it.
- You have strong opinions about agents and where they currently fall apart.
- You use AI in your own loop daily and have a clear view of where it helps and where it
  quietly lies to you.
- You want equity and influence more than a title and a defined lane.

## Probably not a fit if

- You want a well-scoped backlog and a clear specialism.
- You would rather not talk to customers.
- You need the problem to be well-defined before you can start.

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## The stack

Not a checklist — the shape of the work. We care that you can learn the parts you have not
touched yet.

Typed backend services · high-volume event streams · columnar analytics · MCP and agent
protocols · small models and evaluation · modern web frontend · data visualisation · cloud
and on-prem deployment · observability.

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## About Tessera

Tessera is a pre-seed company building the operating layer for organisations where much of
the work is executed by agents. We are funded by early-stage investors and angels, who you
will meet during the process. Early enough that this hire shapes the company; real enough
that the work has to survive customers, scale, security and trust.

**Who you'd build with.** We're assembling this as we go rather than presenting an
already-finished founding team. We introduce ourselves by what we've built; you meet
whoever's actually building this in any real conversation.

**What we offer.**

- Competitive salary and meaningful founding equity — real ownership, not a gesture.
- The chance to define a category while product, architecture and company are still soft.
- Remote-friendly, working directly with the founders every day — Tel Aviv / Amsterdam if you'd rather be in person.

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## How to apply

Tell us what you have built and why this matters to you. That is the whole application.

- **Form:** https://tesserahq.live/apply?role=founding-engineer
- **Agents:** `POST /api/applications` — `GET /apply` with an agent user-agent returns the
  field schema. Agent-submitted applications are welcome and read the same way.
- **Email:** team@tesserahq.live