@ Kiloforge
Founding Engineer — Kiloforge Location: San Francisco (in-person) Compensation: $180K–$225K + 1.00%–1.50% equity Stack: TypeScript, React, Node, Python, SwiftUI About Kiloforge Kiloforge is a seed-stage company in San Francisco building an autonomous app factory — a system that discovers underserved communities, validates ideas, designs products, writes code, launches to market, acquires customers, handles support, and evolves through adaptive learning. The vision is a portfolio of 10,000 self-evolving micro-apps, each solving real pain points for a specialized community and each generating $1M in annual revenue. Unlike Lovable, Bubble, or other AI builders, Kiloforge isn't a platform for others — they build and own the apps themselves. The thesis is unit economics: niche CAC runs $5–15 through community-driven growth versus $50–150 for broad acquisition, and a $50M niche is generational for a lean operation. The portfolio approach is the strategy, not a fallback — they assume 50%+ of apps won't reach scale, with failures running $5–20K each, and only need 2–3 winners out of 10 to hit targets. The company raised a $5.5M pre-seed nine weeks ago, with backing from a16z, Uncork Capital, YC Partners, and Rahul Vohra (founder of Superhuman). The founding team includes AI researchers from Google Brain and DeepMind, engineers from Facebook and Microsoft, and Harvard CS / Applied Math alumni. Previously, the founders built Start Playing Games (YC, a16z-backed) and scaled it to profitability with $60M+ transacted, and built Clientelligent, an AI company acquired by Canoe Financial in 2022. The team is currently three people and hiring three more founding engineers — final headcount is six. The Role You'll ship one real micro-app per week, each better than the last — not prototypes, but live products that real people pay for. You'll also build the engineering pipeline that automates building the next one: marketing pipelines, design systems, engineering infrastructure, launch playbooks. Every app you ship makes the factory smarter and the next app faster. The concrete year-one target: help drive at least one portfolio app to $1M ARR. This is a founding role, not a senior or junior IC role. You own outcomes, not features. Ship Monday, see users respond by Wednesday. Kiloforge starts with off-the-shelf foundation models (Claude, GPT-4) and builds proprietary tooling — custom RAG systems, niche-specific UI components, automated QA, cross-promotion engines — around the bottlenecks. SwiftUI on the stack reflects that native iOS apps are part of the portfolio, not just web. What we're looking for
5+ years building & scaling production software. This is the stated bar, but exceptional candidates with less tenure are seriously considered — the founder's two existing hires came from A16Z's Alpha Fellows program, which skews early-career. Has built and shipped production software used by thousands of real users — owned and scaled professionally, not side projects. This is a non-negotiable. AI-native by default. Daily heavy use of agentic tools (Cursor, Claude, Copilot, etc.) is a hard requirement, not a preference. You should be running multiple agents in parallel as a normal mode of working. Strong personal IDE/terminal setup. The interview will surface this directly and people who aren't fluent here fail. Startup background. Pure big-company engineers tend to be a cultural mismatch. YC founders and ex-YC company engineers are particularly strong fits. Polyglot generalist. Comfortable across TypeScript, React, Node, Python, and SwiftUI — this is a full-stack ship-anything role, not a specialist seat.
Culture Two principles: Proactivity (a bias toward action and anticipation — seeing what needs doing and doing it before being asked) and Good Judgment (the calibration that keeps proactivity pointed in the right direction). The internal mantra is "we are excellent and we need to get better." Excellence is treated as asymptotic. Expect a high-cadence, high-ownership, in-person environment with a small team where every contribution is visible. Benefits
Top-of-the-line hardware and subscriptions to every AI tool you need Comprehensive health, dental, and vision coverage Flexible PTO In-person collaboration in San Francisco
Interview Process Three technical components plus a track-record review:
Agentic coding interview. Build something challenging in a limited time using agentic tools. Fluency with the newest tools is decisive. Pair coding interview. A lighter LeetCode-style exercise — the team wants to see you can still write code by hand, not just direct agents. System design interview. Challenging but not adversarial. Shipped products review. Concrete evidence of products you've taken to real users at scale.
To apply Send resume or LinkedIn URL, a link to a product you've shipped to real users, and a brief note on why Kiloforge interests you to hello@kiloforge.com.