---
title: 'Founding Engineer at Chasi AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founding-engineer-chasi-ai-san-francisco-3ba4pxbdv460'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-09'
---

# Founding Engineer at Chasi AI

- **Company:** Chasi AI
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-04-13
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/chasi-ai/am9icG9zdDovuuuS6kmxjlegwu3vgdO1

## Job description

## About Chasi

Every building, road, warehouse, and farm runs on equipment like tractors, cranes, forklifts, etc. Over 100K dealers and rental companies across North America keep those machines bought, sold, rented, and serviced, but most still operate on phone calls, paper, and decades-old software, with fewer people to do the work every year.

Chasi is building the future of equipment commerce. We help dealers and rental companies sell faster, respond to customers around the clock, and keep machines in the field instead of sitting in a shop or a yard. This is one of the biggest opportunities to bring real-world AI to an industry that software has barely touched. We're based in San Francisco, backed by YCombinator and other top investors, and already working with CAT, John Deere, Bobcat, and other top OEM dealers.

## The Role

Founding product engineer hire. You own the product - designing the infra, building the product, handling customers relationships and onboarding.

## What You'll Own

- Ship production features across the entire platform: voice agents, workflow automation, memory architecture, and the customer-facing UI
- Design and build the real-time voice pipeline: response delivery in sub-second latency
- Evolve our memory system: vector stores that make every agent conversation contextually intelligent
- Build integrations that enterprises actually need: Salesforce, HubSpot, and custom CRM connectors
- Architect multi-tenant infrastructure that scales from 10 to 10,000 organizations
- Make direct technical decisions: model selection, infrastructure tradeoffs, build vs. buy, etc

The Stack Next.js · TypeScript · PostgreSQL · Redis · Twilio · LiveKit · OpenAI · Anthropic · Deepgram · Vector DBs

## What We're Looking For

- 2+ years building production software, ideally full-stack TypeScript/React with real backend depth
- You've worked with LLMs beyond the tutorial stage: prompt engineering, tool use, embeddings, retrieval-augmented generation
- Comfortable in real-time systems: WebSockets, streaming, audio pipelines, or telephony infrastructure
- Strong opinions on architecture, loosely held. You make tradeoffs fast because you've shipped enough to know what matters
- You thrive in ambiguity. You talk to customers, identify what to build, and ship it
- Ownership mentality — this is a founding role with founding-level equity and founding-level responsibility

## Why This Role

Real customers, real revenue, real problems. Every line of code moves the needle. If you ever wanted to build your own startup, this is the best learning ground for you!

Details: 📍 SF, in person, 6 days a week. Requires travel and speaking to customers 💰️ Competitive Salary + Equity + Free meals 🤤 🇨🇦 We can sponser TN visas if required

## About Chasi AI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Chasi AI deploys AI agents that help equipment dealers and rental companies automate sales, service, and rental workflows to maximize fleet utilization and revenue.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Pre-Seed/Seed stage, Y Combinator-backed)
- **Headquarters**: Brooklyn, New York, United States
- **Founded**: 2025
- **Founders**: Akash Pavan (CEO) and Sarman Aulakh (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Industrial commerce technology / Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- **Target customers**: B2B — equipment dealers, distributors, and rental companies in construction, agriculture, energy, and logistics
- **Mission**: To bring AI to equipment dealers and rental companies so teams can stop wrestling with busywork and focus on relationships — ultimately building the agentic infrastructure layer for industrial commerce.

## Products & Services

- **24/7 AI Workforce**: AI agents that handle requests across sales, rentals, and service around the clock — checking availability, generating quotes, and automating renewals, service follow-ups, and dispatch. Plugs into a dealer's existing DMS/ERP/CRM stack.
- **Revenue Intelligence**: Pulls context from existing systems to build a complete picture of every asset, customer, and branch; recommends what to add, remove, or reposition across locations to maximize utilization and profitability.
- **Proactive Market Intelligence**: Tracks which customers are spending more vs. less, scans permits and public filings, and pulls from hundreds of public data sources to surface opportunities before competitors do.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not disclosed
- **Total Funding**: USD $125,000 (Seed round January 2026, 1 investor; Pre-Seed round, 2 investors, led by Y Combinator)
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of $125K; company live across equipment businesses in the US and Europe
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Y Combinator (Winter 2026 batch); investors behind OpenAI, Airbnb, DoorDash, EquipmentShare, and Reddit; Associated Equipment Distributors (AED) Ambassador for 2026; partnership with Holt of California (leading equipment dealer)
- **Growth Signals**: 32,619 monthly website visits (+32.6% MoM), 1,733 LinkedIn followers (+4.8% monthly), active participation at industry events (AED Summit, NADITA 2026, AED Policy Conference in Washington DC), team expanding from 2 founders to 4 employees in early months.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Founder domain expertise**: Both founders have deep AI and industrial backgrounds — Akash Pavan led AI deployments at Cummins, Harley-Davidson, Denso, and other Fortune 500 industrials; Sarman Aulakh built supply chain orchestration software at Tesla and led engineering at multiple startups.
- **Industry focus**: Directly targeting the $1T+ equipment distribution industry (100K+ dealers, distributors, and rental companies in the US alone), with a clear wedge into a market that is underserved by AI.
- **Integration-first approach**: Plugs AI agents into a dealer's existing tech stack rather than requiring a rip-and-replace, lowering adoption friction.
- **YC validation**: Backing from Y Combinator and association with prominent startup investors lends credibility in enterprise sales.
- **Addressing a real pain point**: Fleet utilization sits below 60% across the industry, representing $300B in value lost to idle equipment — a concrete, measurable ROI narrative.

## Strategic Focus
- **Build the "agentic infrastructure layer" for industrial commerce**: Similar to what Amadeus did for travel and Plaid for financial services, Chasi aims to become the clearing and coordination layer across OEMs, distributors, and marketplaces — coordinating equipment, parts, payments, credit, and insurance across the industrial value chain.
- **Expand across sectors**: Bring its AI agents to agriculture, construction, energy, and logistics to improve utilization and lower the real cost of food, housing, transportation, and energy.
- **Scale through partnerships**: Deepen relationships with industry associations (e.g., AED) and flagship dealers (e.g., Holt of California) to drive adoption and case studies.

## Why Work Here
- **Early-stage impact**: The company is only 4 people, so new hires will have outsized ownership and influence in shaping product, engineering, and go-to-market from the ground up.
- **Founder pedigree**: Work closely with founders who have shipped products at Tesla and led AI deployments across major manufacturers (Boeing, Cummins, Harley-Davidson).
- **Y Combinator backing**: Access to YC's network, resources, and credibility, plus the energy and trajectory of a Winter 2026 batch company.
- **Mission-driven work**: The stated goal of "global abundance" through AI-driven equipment utilization is ambitious and tangible — the work directly impacts how the physical world is built and maintained.
- **Company culture signals**: The team describes itself as people who have "built race cars, robots, tractors," suggesting a hands-on, builder-oriented culture.
- **Location**: Based in Brooklyn, NY — with an additional US office in the same area; the YC profile also lists San Francisco as a location. Remote/hybrid policy not explicitly stated.

## Sources
1. [chasi.ai/about-us](https://chasi.ai/about-us)
2. [ycombinator.com/companies/chasi](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/chasi)
3. [linkedin.com/company/chasi-ai](https://linkedin.com/company/chasi-ai)
4. [chasi.ai/careers](https://chasi.ai/careers)
5. [jobs.gem.com/chasi-ai](https://jobs.gem.com/chasi-ai)

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