Cardinal — Founding Product Engineer

Type: Full-time | On-site | San Francisco, CA Compensation: $150,000–$275,000 + 0.5%–1.0% equity Hiring count: 1 Visa sponsorship: None available — US citizen or existing work visa required Reports to: Founders (Devi, Co-founder — no LinkedIn in source)

Cardinal is the AI-native outbound sales platform replacing the SDR-and-GTM-engineer stack companies cobble together today with Apollo, Outreach, Clay, and a few engineers gluing it together. A YC W26 company, it has grown to $80K+ MRR in its first few months, with 50+ YC companies and a growing roster of post-Series A startups running outbound on the platform. Small, dense, design-obsessed team where the bar for engineering taste, product instinct, and aesthetic quality is very high.

Founded: 2025 | Team size: 1–10 (Pre-seed) | Total funding: $5M+ (Audacious, Burst Capital, YC) Industry: AI Tools Website: https://trycardinal.ai/ Office: San Francisco, CA Traction: $80K+ MRR; 50+ YC + post-Series A customers; targeting $10M ARR by mid-2026

• Founding-level ownership: Work directly with the founders, ship to production every week, and have outsized influence on what the product becomes.
• Real traction, early: $80K+ MRR in the first few months, 50+ YC customers, $5M+ raised, targeting $10M ARR by mid-2026.
• Design-obsessed bar: "Linear-quality B2B SaaS" is the explicit standard — engineering taste on par with Linear, Attio, Raycast, Vercel.
• Comp + perks: $150K–$275K base, 0.5%–1.0% equity, free lunch/dinner, transport to and from the office, health insurance, laptop and equipment.

No intake call transcript in source. An Intake Video is present on the role page but was not transcribed — section omitted rather than fabricated.

As a Founding Product Engineer, you'll own the surfaces customers (founders, GTM leaders, sales engineers) live in every day and make a system-of-action sitting on top of every GTM data source (CRMs, enrichment APIs, LinkedIn, intent signals, website visitor data) feel like one beautifully designed product rather than a plumbing project.

• →Build the product surfaces customers use daily: the sequence and enrollment system (per-lead customization, multi-sender, conditional branching), the Cedar agent layer (embedded AI agents that draft, research, and enroll on the user's behalf), and eval/observability tooling
• →Take products from 70 to 100 — ship features the existing engineer has built to 70% up to production-grade quality
• →Sit directly in Slack with customers and translate their requests into product improvements
• →Pair with the founders on what to build next, contributing as much product intuition as engineering work
• →Help define what "Linear-quality B2B SaaS" feels like in Cardinal's category

Tech stack: Next.js, React, Python, FastAPI, Supabase

• 0-4 years engineering, new grads OK
• DS / CS / IE / Operations background
• Customer-facing + technical communication
• Full-stack (Next.js, React, Python, Supabase)
• Product ops instinct
• SF in-person, 5 days a week

• DS/CS/IE background with customer-facing experience
• Prior founder, founding engineer, or first-3 hire at a YC-stage startup. Direct calibration with the role.
• Engineering taste demonstrated through shipped products at Linear, Attio, Raycast, Vercel, Notion, Figma, or comparable quality bar.
• Power user of GTM tools (Apollo, Outreach, Clay, Attio, HubSpot). Has actually run outbound, not just built features for sales teams.
• Strong school background paired with prior startup ownership signal.
• Public portfolio: shipped side projects, GitHub history showing fast iteration, technical writing on product engineering or AI agent UIs

• Pure backend or infrastructure engineer without product intuition or design taste.
• Big-co tenure without startup adaptation. Will struggle with the pace and ambiguity.
• Wants a spec handed to them. The role requires reading customer signals from Slack and converting them into product decisions.
• Requires visa sponsorship
• Cannot or will not work 5 days in person in SF.

• Salary — $150,000–$275,000
• Equity — 0.5%–1.0%
• On-site policy — In-person, 5 days a week
• Visa sponsorship — None available (US citizen or existing work visa required)
• Employment type — Full-time
• Location — San Francisco, CA
• Benefits — Free lunch and dinner, Uber/transportation to and from office, health insurance, free laptop and equipment

No Screening Questions section in source — none listed rather than fabricated.

Stage 1 — Pending Approval — Candidates awaiting initial approval. Stage 2 — Phone Screen with Devi (Co-founder) — Behavioral, product-instinct probe. Devi handles the first two phone screens. Stage 3 — Technical Assessment — Live technical evaluation. Stage 4 — Take-Home Assignment — Product-engineering exercise (e.g., implement a feature spec such as exporting data to spreadsheets, testing whether the candidate can innately understand what the user wants). Stage 5 — In-Person Visit (SF-local candidates) — Optional, depending on candidate location. Stage 6 — Offer Extended Stage 7 — Candidate Hired — Candidate accepts and starts.