---
title: 'Founding Engineer at ara.so'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founding-engineer-ara-so-san-francisco-0rdn6e45jmwg'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Founding Engineer at ara.so

- **Company:** ara.so
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $10k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-07-23
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/ara-so/am9icG9zdDr1wgcQ9dORzZslHiPejQdp

## Job description

## About Ara

Ara is building the cloud coding agent: an autonomous software engineer that turns a trigger into a pull request and reports back in Slack and Linear. We're a YC company (P26) based in San Francisco, moving fast to redefine how software gets built.

## The role

As a Founding Engineer, you'll be one of the first engineers at Ara. You'll own major parts of the product end-to-end, from the cloud IDE and interactive prompting to the autonomous agent that ships code on its own. You'll set the technical direction, ship daily, and directly shape both the product and the culture.

## What you'll do

- Build and own core product surfaces across the full stack
- Design the systems that let autonomous agents write, test, and ship real code
- Work directly with the founders and early customers to iterate fast
- Set engineering standards, tooling, and culture as we scale the team

## What we're looking for

- Strong engineering fundamentals and a bias toward shipping
- Experience building products end-to-end (frontend, backend, or infra)
- Excitement about AI agents, developer tools, and the future of software
- Comfort with ambiguity and ownership in an early-stage environment

Details

- Location: San Francisco (in office)
- Employment: Full-time
- Compensation: competitive salary plus meaningful founding equity

If you want to build the tool that builds software, we'd love to talk.

## About ara.so

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Ara is a cloud coding agent that autonomously plans, executes, and verifies software engineering tasks — turning issues, alerts, or prompts into reviewed, evidence-backed pull requests.
- **Entity Type**: Private (YC-backed, Spring 2026 batch)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2026
- **Founders**: Adi Singh (CEO) and Sven Myhre (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI-powered developer tools / autonomous software engineering
- **Target customers**: Software engineering teams (B2B, from startups to enterprise) who want to automate the full development lifecycle — from bug reproduction to code review and merge.
- **Mission / Purpose**: “Coding is changing from a craft practiced one prompt at a time into an operating system for building.” [ara.so/about](https://ara.so/about)

## Products & Services
- **[Ara Cloud Agent](https://ara.so)**: A cloud-based autonomous software engineer that connects to GitHub repositories. It watches work in progress, plans the next step, and executes tasks using its own isolated ephemeral workspace (Mac, Linux, or Windows). Each run produces a verified pull request with screen recordings, logs, and evidence. Features include durable memory, multi-model routing, Slack integration, security scanning, and a web/mobile interface.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding — Y Combinator’s standard Spring 2026 batch investment (amount not specified); bootstrapped revenue from $20/month individual plan with usage-based top-ups.
- **Notable Investors / Partners**: Y Combinator (primary partner: Aaron Epstein) [ycombinator.com/companies/ara](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ara)
- **Growth Signals**: Active YC batch company (Spring 2026), currently hiring a Founding Engineer. The product is live and publicly accessible; the team is small (2 founders) but shipping a full platform with enterprise features (self-hosted, audit logs, role-based controls).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Verification-first approach**: Every change ships with evidence — screen recordings, logs, and test results — not just a code diff.
- **Durable memory**: The agent learns from each run and writes back knowledge to the repo, so the next run starts smarter.
- **Full lifecycle automation**: Ara doesn’t just write code; it reproduces bugs, writes fixes, runs tests, scans for security issues, and opens a review-ready PR — all in one closed loop.
- **Multi-model & tool-agnostic**: Works as a REST API, MCP server, or Slack bot; can be invoked from Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, or any other tool.

## Strategic Focus
- **Current priorities**: Building reliable agent-assisted engineering at scale — moving from single-run demos to production-grade autonomous workflows. Expanding enterprise controls (self-hosted deployment, compliance records) and deepening integrations with existing developer tools.
- **Direction for growth**: Turn every repository into a semi-autonomous system where human direction is amplified by verified agent execution.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Small team, high ownership, bias toward shipping real production systems. The founders describe it as “the software factory we wanted as engineers.” [ara.so/careers](https://ara.so/careers)
- **Work environment**: Remote-friendly (headquarters in San Francisco). The team has “built and lived together across four cities” [ycombinator.com](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ara). Founding engineer role offers high autonomy across product, runtime, and production systems.
- **Engineering culture**: Emphasis on “dependable products, not demos.” Clear communication and comfort with hard trade-offs are valued. The stack is modern and agent-oriented (cloud infrastructure, LLM orchestration, fast iteration).
- **Perks**: Not explicitly listed, but typical early-stage YC startup benefits (equity, flexible schedule, direct impact on product direction).

## Sources
1. [ara.so](https://ara.so)
2. [ara.so/about](https://ara.so/about)
3. [ara.so/careers](https://ara-90a60a07.mintlify.app/careers)
4. [ycombinator.com/companies/ara](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ara)

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