Founding Engineer

Tanagram's mission is to enable developers to work at the speed of thought. To do that, we're starting by building a collection of tools for developers to rapidly navigate, search, and edit code across repos and codebases that are too big to fit in your head.

IDEs haven't fundamentally changed since the 80s. They're all based on files and folders and lines of text. But developers think in terms of first-order constructs that are unique to each codebase (e.g. chunks of code that represent a data model, API endpoint, asynchronous event consumer, etc). Each construct has static properties (e.g. the retention policies of a data model, URL path of an API endpoint, priority and retry schedule for event consumers, the creation and ownership history for all constructs, etc), and runtime properties (e.g. the size of a data model collection on disk, the response time distribution of an API endpoint, the latency of an event consumer, etc). Taken together, these constructs and properties make up a database and object graph, and, as developers, we think about our work along these lines. We should have tooling to match.

As a founding engineer, you'll help build all of that — both the product itself, and the company around it.

What you'll do:

• Find and talk to potential users.
• Help come up with high-level product concepts and detailed Figma designs for how interactions will work.
• Rapidly, meticulously build iterations of our product, testing out new ideas and responding to user feedback, in a mix of Typescript/React for the UI and a high-performance systems language (e.g. Swift, Go, etc) for backend logic.
• Help manage our user community.
• Other things that may come up from time to time to move our company forward (or keep the lights on).

We will work in-person in San Francisco (our office is currently in Mission Bay).

Qualifications:

• Experience building well-crafted (i.e. generally reliable; tastefully designed) software.
• Creative, original, first-principles problem-solving: at a high level, we're here to invent new ways of working with software. That will involve inventing new interfaces and interactions. More generally, as a startup, we'll have to solve many strategic and operational problems, many of which will require clever solutions to accomplish the ultimate goal.
• Self-directed and self-motivated: you repeatedly, independently seek out the most valuable thing you could be doing, and start working on it. You do so even when requirements and priorities may be changing rapidly.
• Decisive, clear communication on both technical and strategic matters: at this stage, you'll be helping build the foundations of our company. You should have ideas/opinions about almost everything we do, and you should be forthcoming with your thoughts (even if it means being disagreeable).
• Bonus points if you've worked on real compilers/parsers (e.g. LLVM; Typescript), type systems (e.g. Sorbet), or VSCode or IntelliJ itself.
• Bonus points if you've previously worked at a pre-seed/seed-stage startup, or founded one yourself.

We've raised a pre-seed from Pear.vc and will be participating in the PearX accelerator starting in January 2025.