Founding Engineer

Have you ever dreamed of joining a promising early-stage startup as one of the first employees?

Here’s your opportunity to join our journey!

🌕 About Yolk

Yolk is a VC-backed startup (Investors of Anthropic, Groq, Tentsornet)  on a bold mission: To build the best sales departments in the world with elite AI coaching available to every team. Our AI sales coach helps revenue teams catch deal-killing mistakes before they hit your forecast—sharpening discovery, objection handling, negotiation, and more. We’re not just replacing traditional corporate training; we’re lifting win rates, shortening ramp, and unlocking millions in new revenue.  Being the #1 AI coach is big. That’s where you come in.

🌟 The Opportunity

We are looking for an exceptional Founding Engineer to help shape the foundation of our AI-driven product, technology, and culture. This is a unique chance to take ownership of critical technical decisions and directly influence the company's direction. 

This role is ideal for someone who thrives at the intersection of applied ML and hands-on product engineering. You’ll be building systems where LLMs are the core technology shaping the product and our competitive edge.

🎯 Responsibilities & Impact

In this role, you will:

- Own the design and development of our insights platform with LLMs as a core layer.
- Build evaluation-first systems for LLMs, retrieval, and tool-calling.
- Develop end-to-end loops: data → models → metrics → CI.
- Partner with customers and the founding team to turn sales workflows into measurable, coachable behaviors.
- Instrument everything (tracing, A/Bs, guardrails) and automate improvement with LangGraph/LangChain.

Core Team: Yes

REQUIREMENTS

🛠 Requirements

- 3–7+ years in applied ML, data-heavy backend, or agentic LLM systems.
- Proven ability to design, build, and ship production LLM features.
- Experience in fast-paced, ambiguous environments shaping product and platform.
- Strong evaluation mindset; clear trade-offs without hand-waving.
- Excellent communication across engineering, Sales, and Success.
- A builder’s mindset with bias to simplify and ship weekly.
- Hands-on with Python, TypeScript, vector stores, embeddings, retrieval, observability, CI/CD.
- Comfortable with Docker, k8s, and GitHub Actions.

🚫 Who This Role Isn’t For

- Engineers who want to manage people and avoid hands-on building.
- Corporate-minded architects who expect massive infrastructure and rigid processes.
- Those seeking the order and stability of big-company environments—priorities here shift fast.
- Candidates looking for fully remote work - at this stage, we collaborate best in-person.

🌟 Why You’ll Love Working at Yolk

- Ground-floor ownership: Shape the core AI systems at a fast-moving, venture-backed startup.
- High visibility & impact: Work directly with the CEO and leadership team.
- Dual mandate: Ship customer-facing features now, build the ML platform for tomorrow.
- Upside: Competitive salary, stock options, and the chance to share in our success.
- Culture: A dynamic, collaborative, and supportive team that moves fast and wins together.