Founding Engineer – Lava (NYC)
Be on the ground floor of how the world builds and monetizes AI.
Lava is building the core infrastructure and payments layer for the AI internet, enabling the APIs, monitoring, and payments systems necessary to make AI-native products possible. We’re looking for an early engineering hire to help define how and what we build.
What You’ll Do
- Work on cutting-edge problems at the intersection of AI, payments, and infrastructure
- Build integrations with AI providers, payment systems, and developer tools
- Collaborate closely with the founder, product, and sales to set the technical direction and architecture
- Join sales development calls when needed, acting as a forward-deployed engineer who can bridge tech and customer needs
- Move fast, adapt to ambiguity, and help shape the culture and processes from day one
What We’re Looking For
- Driven, resourceful, and self-motivated, thriving in open-ended, fast-changing environments
- Deep engineering experience, ideally full stack with a strong backend focus
- Strong grasp of system design and building for scale
- Hands-on AI user who actively experiments with and integrates AI tools
- Experience with payments, infrastructure, or developer tooling is a plus
- Comfortable switching between building, selling, and learning from users
Why You’ll Love This Role
- You’ll be solving one of the hardest and most important problems in AI, building the infrastructure and payments layer that makes AI-native products possible
- Work in a small, tight-knit, and highly motivated team that stays focused on outcomes and winning without unnecessary distractions
- Work directly with a founder who deeply understands payments and has built in this space before
- Be part of a company operating at the cutting edge of AI, where speed, ownership, and impact matter more than process
- The media is already excited about what we’re building: read our TechCrunch feature here
- Significant influence over technical and product decisions from day one
- Help shape how an entirely new market, AI-to-AI commerce, gets built
If you’re excited about owning big problems, building products people need, and having a direct hand in how the future of AI commerce works, we’d love to talk.