Founding Engineer

About Pascal

Pascal is building an AI operating system for companies. Our aim is to put a company’s knowledge to work, giving people more time for judgment and the tools to act on it.

We connect business data and tools, give them meaning through an ontology, and bring people and agents together in Tasks and Workrooms. We’re building a shared place to investigate what’s happening, decide what should change, and carry the work through.

About the role

As a founding engineer, you’ll work directly with the founder to build the core of an AI operating system for companies. You’ll move between customer operations and deep technical work: understanding a process, modeling its data, building the application, and making it reliable enough to depend on. Your decisions will shape the architecture, the product, and how the engineering team works.

Expect problems with incomplete information, conflicting constraints, and no ready-made specification. You’ll need to decide what matters, get something useful into people’s hands, and stay with it until it works in their environment. Success means someone can make a better decision, resolve an exception, or run an operation they could not before.

What you’ll do

• Work directly with the people running a business. Trace how decisions get made, where information breaks down, and what would materially improve the outcome.
• Turn fragmented operational data into a coherent ontology: the objects, relationships, and actions that describe how a company works.
• Build across the entire system, from ingestion and backend services to the interfaces people use to investigate, decide, and act.
• Give agents the context and tools to do useful work, with explicit permissions, human review where needed, and a clear record of what changed.
• Own the path from an initial deployment to dependable operation. Diagnose failures against real data, handle exceptions, and make the system recover gracefully.
• Find the reusable foundation inside a customer problem. Turn what you learn into platform capabilities that make the next deployment better.
• Make foundational technical decisions and help build a team that values clear thinking, rigorous engineering, and responsibility for the result.

Skills & qualifications

Minimum qualifications

• Evidence that you can take a difficult, loosely defined problem and build a working system people depend on.
• Strong fundamentals in software design, data modeling, and debugging. You can reason across an interface, an API, a database, and the infrastructure beneath them.
• The ability to learn an unfamiliar business domain, ask precise questions, and challenge an assumption when the evidence does not support it.
• Sound judgment about when to move quickly and when correctness, security, or reliability requires deeper work.
• The initiative to make progress independently and the clarity to work closely with users and teammates. You take responsibility when something breaks and follow through on the fix.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience deploying software into complex customer environments and working directly with the people who operate it.
• Work on data platforms, enterprise integrations, ontologies, or distributed workflow systems.
• Experience building AI agents with tools, evaluations, and controls around their actions.
• A company, open-source project, or substantial system you helped build from the beginning.

Logistics

• Work arrangement: Palo Alto, CA · On-site.
• Employment type: Full-time.