Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer – Lava (NYC)

About Lava: Be on the ground floor of how the world builds and monetizes AI.

AI is driving a fundamental shift in software economics. 

Legacy SaaS models were built for humans and per-seat licenses. But this starts falling apart in an AI world: for the first time, software costs are intimately tied to usage rather than seats, and soon, it will be agents, not humans, driving the majority of transactions. The rails to support this AI-native economy don't exist yet.

Lava is building them.

We're creating the universal payments and data infrastructure layer for the AI internet, enabling developers to monetize seamlessly and both people and agents to transact frictionlessly across any service. 

Our mission is to make it effortless for people and AI to work together, starting with the ability to pay and get paid. 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.