About Heretic

Heretic Ventures is a San Francisco-based venture studio ideating and launching new businesses in the creator economy, including those that capitalize on AI/ML technology. Heretic is run by Managing Partner Mariam Naficy, who founded and built the pioneering internet companies Minted and Eve.com. Heretic is backed by household names in Silicon Valley (investors and entrepreneurs), who act as the studio’s advisors both in selecting and in advising companies.

Overview of Role

Heretic Ventures is seeking an experienced full-stack, hands-on Founding Engineer to build the first version of NewCo, a new generative AI consumer business that Heretic Ventures is launching. Depending on interest, the Founding Engineer could also be part of the team that shapes, vets, prototypes and tests other new venture ideas.

The ideal candidate has personally built and launched a consumer product from scratch and is ready to work with new technologies and architectures in a flexible, forward-thinking organization that’s always pushing boundaries. This person will have complete, end-to-end ownership of the consumer-facing launch of the product and will code the product themselves. The Founding Engineer has experience building products across the stack and a firm understanding of web frameworks, APIs, databases, and multiple back-end languages.

This is a unique opportunity to help build a billion-dollar company from the ground up while learning from successful repeat entrepreneurs and a stable of powerful and experienced mentors and advisors. While we would prefer a permanent hire, we are open to discussing a contract role - please approach us to discuss.

This is a hybrid role with the expectation of 3 days per week in-person in our sunny Presidio, SF office. The position is compensated with salary, benefits, and equity.

Objectives of this Role

Partner with the founding team to code and deploy NewCo MVP product
As product is validated, scale technical team by hiring and mentoring additional engineers

Responsibilities

Collaborate closely with founding team members to translate product strategy into buildable MVP that can be rapidly deployed for testing
Lead the team in selecting the appropriate technology stack, framework, and tools to enable experimentation
Own the architecture and development of v1 of working product
Strategize and articulate tradeoffs between speed and scalability
Iteratively build and improve on product based on feedback from users
Think long term to turn MVP into a scalable solution

Qualifications

Bachelors or Masters in Computer Science, Engineering, or other technical field
Has personally built and launched a consumer product from scratch
Has experience managing the end-to-end technology stack of a new product (front end, backend, cloud, CI/CD)
Prior full-stack engineering experience in a fast-growth organization
Expertise in programming languages (e.g., Typescript, JavaScript), modern web frameworks (e.g., React), and cloud service providers (e.g., AWS, GCP)
Superb communication, collaboration, and execution skills

Nice to haves

Experience or interest in hiring engineers and managing a team of engineers
Understanding of leading AI/ML models (text to image models) and tools (e.g., PyTorch)