--- title: 'Founding Engineer at Tightrope' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founding-engineer-tightrope-san-francisco-qvmc2rbwg528' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-09' --- # Founding Engineer at Tightrope - **Company:** Tightrope - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $180k–$250k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** onsite - **Posted:** 2026-09-01 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-09 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/tightrope/23f5da75-501d-44d8-8f0f-10dcf23e2155 ## Job description ## ABOUT US Tightrope is building the AI operating layer for commercial buildings and facilities. The United States has 5.9 million commercial buildings spanning 96 billion square feet. They depend on a network of property management teams, tenants, vendors, and service providers to keep it running. Much of the work today still happens through legacy PMS systems, documents, spreadsheets, inboxes, and manual follow-up. Our first product is an insurance verification platform for commercial real estate teams. Tightrope ingests hundreds of leases and insurance documents associated with a portfolio, finds liability exposure, and communicates with tenants and vendors until the right documents are on file. ## THE TEAM Our founding team has previously built 0→1 teams and products at companies like Merge, Stytch, and Fieldguide. We plan carefully, keep scope tight, and move quickly, without treating long hours or unnecessary complexity as a substitute for good judgment. Within our first 100 days, we launched in two different states and are supporting millions in square feet of properties. Our team broke through one of the most notoriously rigid industries by prototyping fast, embracing a beginners mindset, and valuing the people we work with — and that's how we intend to keep working. ## THE ROLE We’re hiring our second founding engineer. You’ll help scale Tightrope’s first product across entire commercial property portfolios. You’ll build systems that ingest leases and insurance documents, uncover liability exposure, and power the email and voice agents that work with tenants and vendors to close coverage gaps. You'll also help us decide what's next. You'll run the experiments that uncover our next best areas of opportunity and lead the product you're most excited to own. Comfort with that kind of experimentation is part of the job. ## SAMPLE QUESTIONS YOU’D BE EXPLORING - How do we turn messy documents and communication data into an accurate, explainable view of building operations across entire real estate portfolios? - How do we build agents that can represent property management teams through weeks of email and voice communication—following up without losing context and knowing when a person needs to step in? - How do we build AI for non-technical property management operators who are skeptical of automation and want to adopt it one workflow at a time? - How do we turn the data model and integrations into one unified understanding of each building, so every new Tightrope product starts with more context than the last? ## WHO WE’RE LOOKING FOR - Has built substantial customer-facing products across the stack and can reason through the full system—from document and data ingestion to data models, agent behavior, and the operator-facing product. - Wants to own a product while it is still being shaped: working with property management teams, prototyping possible solutions, and developing conviction what needs to be built through real deployments. - Uses AI tools aggressively to explore ideas, then knows how to make the resulting product accurate, explainable, and dependable enough to work with sensitive customer data and communications. - Wants to work closely with a small team and contribute meaningfully to both Tightrope’s technical foundation and what we build next. We care more about slope, judgment, and evidence of ownership than a particular number of years worked or a perfectly matched résumé. ## LOGISTICS & COMPENSATION - This is a full-time role based in San Francisco’s Financial District. We work together in person four days a week. - Base salary of $180,000–$225,000. - Substantial early-employee equity. ## About Tightrope ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Tightrope is an AI-native automation platform that leverages the browser as a universal layer to securely automate complex, manual workflows across enterprise portals and systems. - **Entity Type**: Private (early-stage startup) - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States - **Founded**: Not publicly available (founding team has worked on previous category-defining platforms; company appears to be founded in the last 1–2 years) - **Founders**: Tara Pichumani (CEO) and Alex Zaldastani (CTO) ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: AI-powered browser automation / Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with a focus on computer vision and self-healing agents. - **Target customers**: B2B, serving complex and regulated industries — healthcare, banking, insurance, logistics, pharma, and CPG/retail. - **Mission or purpose**: To make computer-use AI reliable enough for the systems businesses actually run on, turning any user interface into an API. ## Products & Services - **Tightrope Platform**: A full-cycle automation solution that combines screen recording with computer vision to discover, build, test, and maintain browser automations. Key capabilities include: - **Discover**: Records user workflows via screen capture; computer vision maps every step. - **Automate**: Generates structured, editable playbooks from recordings; supports batch processing, cron scheduling, and concurrent runs at scale. - **Maintain**: AI agents automatically adapt automations when UIs change (self-healing). - **Secure**: Enterprise-grade security (SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR) with auth handling (2FA, SSO, rotating credentials), full audit trails, session replays, human-in-the-loop approval gates, and structured logs. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed. - **Key Metric**: Headcount of 4 employees (as of LinkedIn data), with +25% monthly employee growth. - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not publicly disclosed. The founding team includes experience from Merge (Tara Pichumani) and Stytch (Alex Zaldastani). - **Growth Signals**: Early-stage startup with active hiring; LinkedIn presence shows growing office culture; monthly website traffic of ~2,800 visits, 85% from the US. ## Competitive Advantages - **AI-native approach**: Automations build themselves from a single recording — no process mining tool or developer handoff required. - **Self-healing**: Automations adapt automatically when portal UIs change, eliminating maintenance overhead. - **Enterprise security & compliance**: SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance, plus fine-grained approval gates, full session replay, and audit trails — designed for regulated industries. - **Universality**: Works with any browser-based system, regardless of API availability. ## Strategic Focus - **Current priorities**: Making browser-based AI reliable for production, scaling the platform to handle thousands of automations across different verticals, and building a world-class engineering team in San Francisco. - **Direction**: Expand into healthcare, finance, logistics, and insurance sectors where critical data is locked in systems without APIs. ## Why Work Here - **Culture**: Emphasizes real responsibility and autonomy — “small teams do big things when trust is high.” Values direct feedback, craft, clarity, and ownership of outcomes. - **Work environment**: Hybrid workspace in San Francisco, CA. Engineering roles are listed as in-office, with typical on-site presence expected (Built In profile states “Hybrid Workspace” but job postings indicate in-office). - **Perks**: Early-stage startup with a strong founding team; opportunity to build from the ground floor; office described as “a place people actually want to be in” with energy and camaraderie. - **Engineering culture**: Focus on solving real-world complexity (auth, edge cases, variability across systems) with a philosophy that “edge cases aren’t edge — they’re the job.” ## Sources 1. [tightrope.dev](https://tightrope.dev/) 2. [tightrope.dev/team](https://tightrope.dev/team) 3. [Built In - Tightrope Careers](https://builtin.com/company/tightrope) 4. [LinkedIn - Tightrope](https://www.linkedin.com/company/tightrope-ai) 5. 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