Senior Software Engineer - Startups

About the role

Software Engineers: Let 100+ Companies Compete For You

Fonzi is an AI recruiting company.

No job boards. No recruiter spam. Companies request to interview you and submit salary bids upfront.

Every week, hiring managers at 100+ pre-vetted startups in NYC and San Francisco review a curated group of engineers. They're reading profiles optimized by our team to surface what matters: what you've built, how you think about systems, and whether you're the kind of engineer who ships.

Companies on Fonzi are Applied AI startups, Frontier labs, Hypergrowth startups, PE firms starting lean AI teams and more. They're backed by investors like A16z, Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Y Combinator and more.

How It Works

2-minute application

We reach out, learn what you're building and what excites you, and optimize your profile

Hiring managers review the cohort and request interviews with candidates they want

Companies submit competing salary bids directly to you

You only interview where you're genuinely interested

Completely free. We have an iMessage agent + humans in the loop you can text anytime w/ questions or requests to help handle scheduling and coordination

Who We're Looking For

The engineers who do best on Fonzi:

Have built AI-powered products end-to-end, not just prototypes, but systems handling real users

Can talk fluently about retrieval, memory, agent frameworks, context engineering, eval pipelines and anything else at the cutting edge

Combine strong software engineering fundamentals with deep awareness of what's happening at the frontier of LLMs and agentic systems

Thrive in startup environments where the problem is ambiguous and the team is small

Have 2-8 years of experience, ideally with experience at at least one high-growth company

What You'll Build

The companies on Fonzi are working on:

Agentic systems that automate complex, multi-step workflows across healthcare, legal, fintech, logistics, and compliance

Production RAG pipelines powering domain-specific knowledge retrieval at scale

AI-native products where the intelligence layer is the product, not a feature

Multi-agent orchestration systems with tool-calling, memory, and reasoning capabilities

Eval and safety infrastructure that makes AI systems trustworthy enough for enterprise deployment

Full-stack AI applications from MVP to enterprise-grade, serving real customers today

Compensation

$200,000 – $400,000+ base salary depending on experience and role. Many positions include meaningful equity at pre-seed through Series B stage companies.

The Interview Process (Typical)

Screening conversation looking for communication skills, cultural fit, genuine curiosity about AI

Technical deep-dive talks on architecture thinking, how you'd design an AI system for a real problem

Coding or pairing sessions building

If you're an engineer who's been building with AI because you can't stop thinking about it we want to hear from you.