---
title: 'Founding Engineer at Workstream'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founding-engineer-workstream-lehi-4x9m4p0be2ac'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-06'
---

# Founding Engineer at Workstream

- **Company:** Workstream
- **Location:** Lehi
- **Posted:** 2026-08-19
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-06
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/workstream/jobs/6147781004

## Job description

Workstream is a mission-driven company building the all-in-one HR, payroll, and hiring platform for managing the hourly workforce. There are 2.7 billion hourly workers, making up 80% of the global workforce, but this market has been heavily underserved by technology and deserves better. Workstream has been purpose-built for the hourly workforce from day one so that these businesses and their employees can thrive.

Our customers include leading brands from multiple sectors, including Burger King, Carl's Jr./Hardee's, IHOP, KFC, and Culvers. We are a high growth series B company and quickly expanding our product portfolio to deliver on our vision. We are backed by legendary VCs and industry experts like Founders Fund, BOND, and Coatue.

Day In The Life

Workstream is building AI-native services that deliver completed business outcomes—mature service categories businesses already pay for, delivered by AI agents plus a small human review layer at materially better margins than the traditional alternative. We are validating the first service now with design customers from our existing base. You will be the first engineering hire on the delivery team, reporting to the Head of Delivery, AI-Native Services.

This is a forward-deployed builder role. You will embed with design customers, map their real workflows, and build the production agents, integrations, evaluations, and review tooling that turn that work into a reliable, repeatable service. You will see your systems do real work with real consequences for real people—and you will be on the hook when they misbehave.

You will not own pricing, deal acceptance, or the margin model—those sit with the Head of Delivery and the Head of GTM. You will own the components: whether they work, how they fail, and how fast bespoke work becomes reusable.

This is a full-time, hybrid position with 1 to 2 days a week in-office to support close cross-functional collaboration.

- Build and operate production agents and agentic workflows: orchestration, tool use, data connections, deterministic logic, state, and permissions.
- Work forward-deployed with design customers—sit in their workflow, map the messy reality, and build against live data.
- Build the evaluation harness: eval datasets from real customer work, pre-launch thresholds, regression suites, and post-launch monitoring.
- Build the human-review layer: exception queues, review tooling, escalation paths, and the tracing that makes every agent decision auditable.
- Run shadow-mode parallel runs against the customer's existing process or provider and drive discrepancies to zero before go-live.
- Turn customer-specific work into reusable agents, integrations, and playbooks—productization is the default, customization the exception.
- Handle production incidents end to end, and feed every failure back into evals and controls so it cannot recur.
- Help set the technical bar as the team grows.

## Who You Are

- You have personally built and operated at least one AI agent or agentic workflow in production. You can clearly explain how it worked, where it failed, how you evaluated it, and what you kept deterministic or human-led.
- Strong engineering judgment across models, orchestration, APIs, data and integrations, permissions, observability, and evaluations.
- You have worked directly with customers or end users—discovery, implementation, or incident resolution—and communicate clearly with non-technical people.
- You can break a messy workflow into deterministic steps, agentic decisions, human judgment, and exception paths—and define how each part will be tested.
- You care about keeping plausible but wrong AI output away from customers: grounded context, constrained actions, verification, evals, review, monitoring.
- You thrive in zero-to-one ambiguity: shipping weekly, owning outcomes, and doing whatever the service needs—including unglamorous review tooling and data plumbing.
- Exposure to a regulated domain (payroll, payments, tax, benefits, labor compliance) is a plus, not a requirement.
- Demonstrated production experience matters more than title or years.

## What We Offer

- A mission-driven and value-based company dedicated to empower deskless workers and local businesses
- An early employee opportunity at a Series B hyper-growth startup; work with the founding team and industry veterans to accelerate your career
- Competitive salary and equity
- Comprehensive health coverage: medical, dental, and vision. We pay 95% of your premiums for our employees and 85% for dependents
- In office amenities and stocked kitchen
- 401K Plan
- Flexible PTO

Know More About Workstream

- https://www.workstream.us/blog/funding-series-b
- https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/26/workstreams-text-based-recruitment-tool-gets-a-48m-bet-from-bond-and-beyond/
- https://techbuzz.news/buzzworthy-august-27-2021/

Additional Information

Workstream provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.

We are committed to the full inclusion of all qualified individuals.

## About Workstream

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Workstream provides an all-in-one AI-powered HR, payroll, and hiring platform purpose-built for hourly, multi-location businesses, primarily in the restaurant industry.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2017
- **Founders**: Desmond Lim (CEO), Lei Xu (CSO & Co-founder), Max Wang (CTO & Co-founder)

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: HR Technology, Payroll Software, Recruiting/Hiring Software, Restaurant Technology
- **Target customers**: B2B; specifically multi-location restaurant chains and other hourly-workforce businesses (e.g., retail, hospitality). Their customers include 46 of the top 50 quick-service restaurant brands.
- **Mission or purpose statement**: "Empowering local businesses and the hourly workforce to thrive" [workstream.us](https://www.workstream.us/about)

## Products & Services
- **AI-Powered Hiring Platform**: An end-to-end solution that includes job posting to hundreds of boards, AI-driven candidate screening, and automated interview scheduling via their "VoiceAI" feature. [workstream.us](https://www.workstream.us/)
- **HR & Compliance Platform**: Tools for managing I-9s, e-verify, time clock violations, meal break alerts, and digital form collection to ensure compliance with labor laws. [workstream.us](https://www.workstream.us/)
- **Payroll Solution**: An all-in-one payroll system designed for hourly workers, featuring custom reports, an AI assistant for error detection, and audit reconciliation. [workstream.us](https://www.workstream.us/)
- **Onboarding & Employee Management**: Digital onboarding workflows and employee management tools designed to reduce time-to-productivity for new hires.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding of **$118M** across multiple rounds, including a $60M Series B in 2022 led by Notable Capital (formerly GGV Capital). [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/workstream-us)
- **Annual Revenue**: Estimated at **$14.3M** (based on LinkedIn data). [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/workstream-us)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: GGV Capital (Notable Capital), CRV, Basis Set Ventures, Founders Fund (Keith Rabois), BOND (Jay Simons), Coatue, and individual angels like Tony Xu (CEO of DoorDash) and Eric Yuan (CEO of Zoom). [workstream.us](https://www.workstream.us/about)
- **Growth Signals**: Trusted by 46 of the top 50 restaurant brands (e.g., Burger King, Jimmy John's, Taco Bell, Culver's, Papa Johns) across 30,000+ locations. Launched a first-of-its-kind all-in-one payroll solution for the hourly workforce in 2024. [workstream.us](https://www.workstream.us/)

## Competitive Advantages
- **Deep Vertical Focus**: Purpose-built for the restaurant industry, not a generic HR platform. This allows for highly specific features like tip pooling, shift management, and compliance with complex hospitality labor laws.
- **AI-First Approach**: Integrates AI at every layer—from "VoiceAI" for candidate screening and interview scheduling to an AI assistant for payroll error detection—creating significant efficiency gains for managers.
- **High Customer Concentration & Trust**: 46 of the top 50 QSR brands use Workstream, creating a strong network effect and deep domain expertise that is hard for generalist competitors to replicate.
- **All-in-One Platform**: Combines hiring, onboarding, HR compliance, and payroll into a single system, eliminating the need for multiple point solutions for restaurant operators.

## Strategic Focus
- **Product Expansion**: Deepening the all-in-one platform, particularly with the recent launch of their native payroll solution to compete with legacy providers.
- **AI Integration**: Continuing to leverage AI (VoiceAI, AI assistant) to automate manual tasks for hiring, scheduling, and payroll, driving efficiency for customers.
- **Market Penetration**: Expanding beyond their strong QSR base into other hourly-workforce verticals like retail and hospitality.
- **Global Scale**: With offices in the US, Canada, China, and the Philippines, they are building a global team to support a growing international customer base.

## Why Work Here
- **High-Impact Environment**: Workstream is a growth-stage company (191 employees) with a clear market leader position in a massive industry (restaurant tech). Employees have the opportunity to work on problems that directly impact millions of hourly workers. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/workstream-us)
- **Culture & Values**: The company emphasizes a culture of "Humble and Hungry," "Direct Feedback is a Gift," and "Everyone does Customer Success." They value transparency, trust, and a beginner's mindset. [workstream.us](https://www.workstream.us/careers)
- **Remote/Hybrid Policy**: They have offices in San Francisco, Lehi (Utah), Shanghai, and Vancouver. Roles vary, with many engineering and strategic roles based in Menlo Park and San Francisco, suggesting a hybrid or in-office preference for certain teams. [workstream.us](https://www.workstream.us/careers)
- **Perks & Benefits**: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans; generous mental health support (fully-paid therapy sessions); flexible PTO; paid parental leave; and competitive compensation with equity. [workstream.us](https://www.workstream.us/careers)
- **Team & Growth**: A team of ~191 people with backgrounds from top companies (Google, Yelp, Qualtrics, Zoom) and universities (Stanford, MIT, Harvard). The company is well-funded ($118M) and growing, offering significant ownership and impact. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/workstream-us)

## Sources
1. [workstream.us](https://www.workstream.us/)
2. [workstream.us](https://www.workstream.us/about)
3. [workstream.us](https://www.workstream.us/careers)
4. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/workstream-us)
5. [greenhouse.io](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/workstream/jobs/6006952004)

## Other roles at Workstream

- [Chief of Staff](https://feeny.ai/job/chief-of-staff-workstream-san-francisco-tp9w8pzf0tkx) — San Francisco, CA
- [Corporate Partnerships Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/corporate-partnerships-manager-workstream-san-francisco-s6mwg9trcaxv) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Product Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-marketing-manager-workstream-singapore-pp70jh4y8bph) — Singapore
- [Head of Brand & Product Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-brand-product-marketing-workstream-singapore-p7gjta8ty5g9) — Singapore
- [Partnerships Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/partnerships-manager-workstream-san-francisco-3mp5eveg0mva) — San Francisco, CA
- [Senior Product Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-marketing-manager-workstream-lehi-5kz5b27y0c2m) — Lehi
- [Head of Brand & Product Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-brand-product-marketing-workstream-lehi-pqcsgnz70c40) — Lehi
- [Personal and Executive Assistant to the CEO](https://feeny.ai/job/personal-and-executive-assistant-to-the-ceo-workstream-menlo-park-j1n2b31fb2kg) — Menlo Park, CA
- [Senior Product Marketing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-product-marketing-manager-workstream-san-francisco-kw3s5e50p5ff) — San Francisco, CA
- [Head of Brand & Product Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/head-of-brand-product-marketing-workstream-san-francisco-3ck3vt4bsr21) — San Francisco, CA