Founding Member of Technical Staff

San Jose, CA
Full-time
Visa Sponsorship

About the role

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.

About Ignition Benefits

The AI-Native Benefits Brokerage

Required skills

Python
TypeScript
AI Agents

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Job details

Salary

$180,000 - $200,000

Equity

0.15% - 0.35%

Location

San Jose, CA

Experience

6+ years

Company

NameIgnition Benefits
IndustryInsurtech
Team Size12

Founders

Nick Taranto

Nick Taranto

LinkedIn

What happens next.

No applications, no recruiter spam. Just the intro.

01

Confirm the fit

A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.

02

I pitch you to the company

I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.

03

A meeting lands on your calendar

If they’re a yes, I book the chat. You show up — that’s the whole job-hunt.