---
title: 'Founding Engineer at People Culture Talent'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founding-engineer-people-culture-talent-san-francisco-fx2mzw6yd8b9'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-15'
---

# Founding Engineer at People Culture Talent

- **Company:** People Culture Talent
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-09-09
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-15
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/people-culture-talent/02840194-4fef-4446-b0bb-694a4186e16d

## Job description

Note: We are recruiting on behalf of our valued client. This opportunity is for a position with their organization, not with People Culture Talent. We're excited to help connect talented professionals with this exceptional team!

## The Role

We're hiring a Founding Engineer to join an early-stage company building AI-powered software and data infrastructure for healthcare organizations operating in highly regulated, data-intensive environments. This is a foundational engineering hire. You'll work directly with the founders to design and build core product experiences, develop AI-enabled workflows, implement customer deployments, and help establish the engineering systems and practices that will support the company's growth. The platform brings together large volumes of clinical, operational, and financial data to automate workflows, surface actionable insights, and improve decision-making for enterprise healthcare customers. The role is well suited for an engineer who enjoys working across product, design, and engineering, is comfortable wearing multiple hats, and thrives owning projects from initial concept through production.

## What You’ll Own

Product Engineering

- Design, build, and ship product features across the stack, from database design and APIs through frontend applications
- Build and maintain integrations with external systems, structured datasets, and enterprise data sources
- Develop infrastructure that powers AI-enabled product experiences, including LLM-driven workflows and intelligent automation
- Improve application performance, reliability, and scalability as customer usage and data volumes grow
- Work closely with founders and users to translate complex operational requirements into intuitive software

Customer Deployments

- Partner with customers during implementation and onboarding
- Configure integrations, data mappings, and deployment workflows
- Participate in customer conversations and translate feedback into product improvements
- Support and maintain the systems you build, including incident response, debugging, and operational troubleshooting

Engineering Foundation

- Help establish engineering practices around testing, deployments, observability, security, and code review
- Build systems that meet the reliability and compliance expectations of enterprise customers
- Mentor future team members and help shape the company's engineering culture

## What You’ll Bring

- 3–5+ years of experience building and shipping customer-facing software
- Familiarity with healthcare data standards (FHIR, HL7, X12, EHR, claims, or similar)
- Strong experience with React, TypeScript, and modern web application development
- Full-stack experience across frontend applications, APIs, databases, and background services, including work with complex enterprise or operational data systems
- Experience building and deploying AI-enabled product features using modern LLMs, agent frameworks, or retrieval-based systems
- Familiarity with prompt engineering, evaluation workflows, and AI application development best practices
- Strong product judgment and the ability to work effectively with limited process or oversight

Bonus

- Experience in customer-facing engineering roles such as implementation engineering, solutions engineering, forward deployed engineering, or technical consulting
- Understanding of enterprise deployment requirements, security best practices, and compliance-focused environments (HIPAA, SOC 2, etc.)
- Comfortable working in a fast-paced startup where engineering, product, and customer success are closely intertwined

## Benefits

The starting salary for this role is $180,000, with a range up to $240,000 USD. The provided salary depends on many factors, such as work experience and transferable skills, business needs and impact, and market demands.

## About Our Client

Our client is an early-stage, venture-backed software company building an AI-native platform for organizations managing complex operational and healthcare data. Their technology helps customers unify fragmented information, automate manual workflows, and generate actionable insights that improve decision-making across clinical and business operations. The founding team brings deep expertise across software engineering, machine learning, and enterprise systems, and is building a category-defining platform for one of the largest and most data-intensive industries. This is an opportunity to join at the earliest stages, work directly alongside the founders, and help shape both the product and engineering organization from the ground up.

## About People Culture Talent

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: People Culture Talent (PCT) partners with venture-backed startups to build exceptional teams through embedded talent search, people operations, and culture‑building services.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Bootstrapped)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2018
- **Founders**: Tianna Johnson and Caitlin Cooke

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Human Resources / Talent & People Operations
- **Target customers**: Venture‑backed technology startups at all stages (seed to pre‑IPO), venture capital firms, and high‑growth companies.
- **Mission**: “To build better founders and companies by creating the people, culture, and talent foundations that generational companies are made of.”

## Products & Services
PCT offers a full suite of services organized around three pillars:
- **Talent** – Retained and embedded executive search, recruiting process design, talent strategy, ATS implementation (Ashby partner), candidate experience design, and recruiting metrics.
- **Culture** – Values definition and operationalization, workplace culture development, mission/vision/framework creation, retreat/offsite planning, and employer branding.
- **People** – Organizational design & headcount planning, performance management systems, leveling & career architecture, total rewards, benefits strategy, onboarding/offboarding, payroll & HRIS implementation, manager enablement, and fractional services (marketing, customer support, L&D, Chief of Staff).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not publicly available (private, no disclosed funding).
- **Key Metric**: 220 total employees (as of early 2025); companies they have scaled average 300% annual growth.
- **Notable Investors / Partners**: Not an investment‑backed firm; clients and partners include Andreessen Horowitz (where co‑founder Caitlin Cooke advised portfolio companies), Ashby (premier implementation partner), Rippling, Lattice, Leapsome, Gem, Juicebox.
- **Growth Signals**: 5 offices globally (San Francisco, plus remote hubs across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Philippines). Currently hiring engineers (Founding Engineer, Product Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer) indicating a push to build internal platform tools. Have scaled a single client from 10 to 800 team members.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Embedded operating model** – PCT works inside the client’s tools (Slack, ATS, etc.), providing full transparency and real‑time collaboration, unlike traditional agencies.
- **Boutique by design** – The firm intentionally stays small and flat, with senior operators directly managing every engagement. No handoffs to junior consultants.
- **Proven pattern recognition** – Founders have personally scaled engineering and talent teams at Lyft (400→7,000 for IPO), GitHub (through Microsoft acquisition), Notion (20→600, $500M→$10B valuation), and ID.me (100→1,500).
- **Full‑lifecycle offering** – Covers everything from first hire to pre‑IPO people infrastructure, making it a one‑stop partner for founders.

## Strategic Focus
- Deepen the “platform” side of the business by building internal software and systems (ATS implementations, people analytics, automation).
- Expand fractional services across more functions (marketing, customer support, L&D, Chief of Staff).
- Maintain a people‑first, high‑trust culture that mirrors what they advise clients to build.
- Continue serving the venture‑backed ecosystem, from early‑stage founders to later‑stage transformations.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Described as a team of seasoned operators who are “unapologetically embedded” and committed to honest counsel. Values include accountability, collaboration, and continuous learning.
- **Work style**: Hybrid environment with a mix of remote and on‑site work. Offices in San Francisco and remote hubs across multiple countries. Some roles are fully remote, others require in‑office presence (SF).
- **Team**: Small (220 employees) but expanding; direct access to founders and partners. Engineers and non‑engineering roles alike work on high‑impact projects for top VC‑backed startups.
- **Perks**: Not publicly detailed; typical benefits for a Bay Area talent firm likely include competitive compensation, flexibility, and the opportunity to shape the people‑tech ecosystem.

## Sources
1. [People.Culture.Talent. – Homepage](https://www.peopleculturetalent.com/)
2. [Who We Are – People Culture Talent](https://www.peopleculturetalent.com/who-we-are)
3. [What We Do – People Culture Talent](https://www.peopleculturetalent.com/what-we-do)
4. [Built In – People Culture Talent Profile](https://builtin.com/company/people-culture-talent)
5. [People Culture Talent – Careers Page (Ashby)](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/people-culture-talent)

## Other roles at People Culture Talent

- [Founding Business Development Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-business-development-lead-people-culture-talent-san-francisco-b6m3cfse70b9) — San Francisco, CA
- [Security Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/security-engineer-people-culture-talent-san-francisco-98xn73psp5c3) — San Francisco, CA
- [Forward Depolyed Engineer (FDE)](https://feeny.ai/job/forward-depolyed-engineer-fde-people-culture-talent-san-francisco-62nn65kccn5n) — San Francisco, CA
- [Infrastructure Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/infrastructure-engineer-people-culture-talent-san-francisco-mcd3j4674w66) — San Francisco, CA
- [Founding Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-engineer-people-culture-talent-san-francisco-1wjk0jw364gj) — San Francisco, CA
- [PCT | Technical Sourcer](https://feeny.ai/job/pct-technical-sourcer-people-culture-talent-united-states-3asakrgq1hpr) — United States
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