Founding Member of Technical Staff
Ignition Benefits · San Jose, CA, US
Job Description
About Ignition
Ignition Benefits is the AI-native employee-benefits brokerage for companies with 25–200 employees. We believe the $900B+ employer benefits market is broken: opaque, manual, and stuck in the 1990s. We are changing that with technology, transparency, and a radically better client experience. We're backed by Y Combinator and Equal Ventures, and our CEO previously built and sold Plated for $300M, the largest exit in Shark Tank history. You are joining a team that knows how to build and scale.
Where You'll Create Impact
- Build full-stack web apps our customers and our own ops team use every day
- Ship features end to end — architecture, CI/CD, testing, monitoring, and beyond
- Build AI agents and durable workflows that run our back office — processes that run for weeks, wait on external systems, and resume where they left off
- Put agents in production, not in demos — human approval, evals, observability, etc
- Integrate third-party tools and external systems, proactively managing edge cases and risk
- Debug hard production issues and fix them for good
- Raise the bar through code reviews and technical discussions
What Sets You Up for Success
- 5+ years in full-stack engineering (TypeScript/Node.js/PostgreSQL/React and modern backend/frontend tooling and frameworks)
- Deep experience with complex business-logic products
- Solid understanding of system design, data schema design, and scalability
- Strong code quality standards and attention to detail — you can write code without AI, and you use it spec-driven, not vibe-coding
- Bonus: Python (FastAPI), LangGraph, Temporal; experience building ReAct loops, RAG
How You Operate
- Hybrid — 3 days in the office with the team, 2 remote
- Hardcore work ethic and high agency — you deploy daily, iterate fast, and don't wait for permission
- You own the product, not just the ticket — no PM will hand you a spec
- Curious about new AI tooling and how to make agentic workflows reliable
Why You'll Thrive Here
- Equity ownership in a YC-backed AI company disrupting the legacy employee-benefits industry
- Small, senior engineering team led by a CTO who scaled a startup engineering org from 2 to 50+
- Learn the industry from a founding team with decades in employee benefits
- Get the AI engineering experience the market values most, on real systems with real customers
- Your feedback shapes the product directly
- High-speed, high-trust environment with high expectations
Compensation
- Base: $180,000 – $200,000
- Equity: 0.15% – 0.35%
- Medical, dental and vision — we're a benefits brokerage, ours are worth having
- 401(k)
Join us: automate what's boring, solve what's hard, and build the agentic platform this industry has never had.
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