---
title: 'Founding Growth Lead at Steel'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/founding-growth-lead-steel-toronto-tyghbpwvhry8'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-15'
---

# Founding Growth Lead at Steel

- **Company:** Steel
- **Location:** Toronto, Canada
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-10-14
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-15
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/steel/693e1d27-5317-466d-89a0-14d6cbb46baf

## Job description

## About Steel

Steel is building open-source browser infrastructure for AI agents and apps. We make it easy for developers to ship AI products that interact with the web using our [Sessions API](https://docs.steel.dev/overview/sessions-api/overview). With over 7,000 GitHub stars, dozens of paying customers, and millions of sessions served monthly, we grew our platform 50x in 2025 purely through word-of-mouth and our open-source community. Backed by world-class investors, we're building a small, highly motivated, and talent-dense team that's shaping the future of how humans interact with the internet. More on the problems we're solving: https://docs.steel.dev/overview/intro-to-steel

## The Role

We're looking for a Founding Growth Lead to turn Steel's organic momentum into systematic, repeatable user and revenue growth. We think great developer tool growth comes down to three things: developers discovering you when they have the problem, experiencing immediate value, and wanting to tell others. You'll own growth across the full funnel, from driving awareness among AI engineers to optimizing activation and expansion. Our GTM motion is product-led growth combined with product-led sales. Most users discover Steel, sign up, and upgrade through self-service. For enterprise customers, we step in to assist them with their evaluation, security review, and procurement processes. You'll work directly with the CEO and our founding engineering and growth team to experiment relentlessly across channels, create content that resonates with developers, and build the systems that scale what's working. This isn't a traditional growth marketing role. You'll need to be technical enough to write code, ship demos, and engage with developers authentically. If running an influencer outreach campaign one day and launching a demo app you built on Steel over the weekend the next doesn't excite you, this isn't the role. We work hard, move fast, and expect the same intensity from our team. This role can start as contract-to-hire or go straight to full-time for the right person.

Sample projects could include

- Building our content machine: turn AI agent experiments and research into high-value blog posts, demos, and technical content that establishes Steel as the authority on browser automation
- Running influencer campaigns with AI engineers and developer advocates to amplify our reach in technical communities
- Running fast experiments across channels, messaging, value props, and ICP to figure out what actually drives developer adoption and conversion
- Executing launches for new features and open-source releases that create momentum and bring thousands of developers to Steel
- Working with engineers to optimize our self-serve funnel through relentless experimentation on activation, conversion, and retention to turn freemium into paying customers
- Organizing events, dinners, and community gatherings that turn users into advocates and create deeper relationships with key customers
- Building our presence across developer communities (X, Reddit, HN, Discord) with S-tier shit posts

You could be a great Founding Growth Lead if you

- Have 4+ years growing developer tools, API products, or infrastructure companies through product-led motion
- Are technical. You understand what Steel does, can write code, build demos, and engage with developers on their level
- Understand the importance of content in modern growth and can create compelling technical content that developers can't stop reading
- Run experiments relentlessly and prioritize growth loops over linear channels. You think about compounding acquisition where one cohort brings the next
- Move fast and have extreme bias for action. You ship, measure, learn, and iterate without waiting for perfect information
- Have good taste and understand what resonates with developers across platforms. You're active in technical communities and know what's signal vs. noise
- Friends describe you as cracked

Nice-to-haves

- Ex-founder experience
- Product-led growth experience at companies like Vercel, Supabase, Render, or similar developer tool companies
- Experience growing a product from pre-revenue to $1M+ ARR
- Have written technical content that developers bookmark, share,, and come back to

## Our Values

User First, Always The developers building on Steel and their end-users come first. Our infrastructure is mission-critical to some of the most important AI apps. We succeed only when our users succeed. Open Source at Heart We build in the open and contribute back to the community. Open source isn't just a strategy for us, it's fundamental to how we create better software and push the entire field forward. Move with Speed & Urgency Speed is our business strategy. We make quick, deliberate decisions, learn rapidly through action, and stay intensely focused on what moves the needle. Build for the Long Term Infrastructure is a decades-long game, and we want to go the distance. We tackle building enduring services the only way we know how: Gradatim Ferociter. Be Obsessed Beyond the point that most would consider reasonable. We're obsessive about API design, performance, and reliability, not because we have to be, but because we want to be. If you consider your craft as an extension of yourself, you'll fit right in. Show, Don't Tell Start with the experience we want developers to have—the docs they'll read, the demos that'll make them say "wow." Then work backwards until the implementation matches the magic.

## What We Offer

- Own the growth engine for what will power the next million AI agents
- Pour fuel on fire: leverage strong organic momentum (7K+ stars, 70% MoM growth) to scale systematically
- High Impact: Founding team member who becomes the leader of this function as we scale
- Founding team-level equity
- Work with innovative AI companies transforming healthcare, supply chain, accounting, and more
- Shape a category: browser infrastructure for AI agents

Benefits: Competitive salary, health and dental insurance for you and your family, regular team events and off-sites, and a brand-new laptop setup.

## About Steel

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Steel provides an open-source, cloud-based browser API purpose-built for AI agents, allowing developers to control fleets of headless browsers for web automation, scraping, and data extraction.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Startup, Pre-Seed/Seed stage inferred)
- **Headquarters**: United States (Remote team across US, Canada, Croatia, and India)
- **Founded**: 2024
- **Founders**: Hussien Hussien (CEO) & Nasr Mohamed (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary Industries**: Browser Infrastructure, AI Agent Infrastructure, Web Automation & Data Extraction
- **Target Customers**: B2B; AI engineers, LLM application developers, enterprises needing web data for AI models, foundational model trainers, and teams building web agents (e.g., shopping assistants, RPA, QA, sales automation).
- **Mission/Purpose**: To let developers build AI products that can browse the web by abstracting away the complexity of browser infrastructure — handling CAPTCHAs, proxies, JavaScript rendering, and scaling so teams can focus on shipping product instead of "babysitting browsers."

## Products & Services
- **Steel Browser (Open Source)**: A batteries-included browser sandbox that developers can run locally or self-host. Built to automate the web without managing infrastructure.
- **Sessions API**: The core cloud API — spin up on-demand browser sessions with a single API call (or via Python/Node SDKs). Features include persistent context (cookies, local storage), stealth proxies, auto CAPTCHA solving, up to 24-hour long sessions, and session viewer/replay for debugging.
- **surf.new**: An open-source alternative to OpenAI Operator, demonstrating browser agent capabilities.
- **Steel MCP Server**: An MCP (Model Context Protocol) server for integrating Steel browser control into AI agent workflows.
- **Steel Cookbook**: A repository of examples and guides for common use cases (scraping, sign-in flows, etc.).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available
- **Key Metrics**:
  - **Funding**: Total funding not publicly disclosed (grants available for researchers)
  - **Scale**: 800B+ tokens scraped, 800,000+ browser hours served
  - **Community**: 6,800+ GitHub stars on `steel-browser`; 1,390+ stars on `awesome-web-agents` repo
  - **Growth**: 125% headcount growth YoY (5 employees as of mid-2024)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not publicly disclosed (talent sources listed include Disequi, Sane, onova, Rubric Labs — suggests early-stage backing from these entities).
- **Growth Signals**: Rapid open-source adoption; launching new products like surf.new and MCP Server; active hiring for senior technical roles; presence in multiple countries (US, Canada, Croatia, India).

## Competitive Advantages
- **Open-Source First**: Core browser engine is open source (MIT), allowing self-hosting and deep customization — building trust and developer mindshare.
- **Purpose-Built for AI/LLMs**: Unlike generic scraping tools, Steel is optimized for AI agent use cases — reducing LLM token costs by up to 80% with cleaned HTML, markdown, and screenshots.
- **Batteries-Included Infrastructure**: Handles the full stack of web friction — CAPTCHA solving, rotating proxies, stealth fingerprinting, auto sign-in, and session management — all via a single API.
- **Performance**: Sub-second average session start times; horizontal scaling and 24-hour long sessions for heavy workloads.

## Strategic Focus
- **AI Agent Ecosystem**: Deepening integration with the agent stack (MCP server, cookbooks, SDKs) to make Steel the default browser layer for any web-using AI agent.
- **Enterprise Readiness**: Investing in dedicated support, HIPAA-ready BAAs, enterprise SSO, and reserved browser pools for high-compliance, high-scale customers.
- **Community & Open Source**: Building a developer community around browser agents, with open source tools and leaderboards (e.g., `surf.new`, `leaderboard` repo) to establish Steel as the standard for browser agent infrastructure.

## Why Work Here
- **High-Impact, Early-Stage**: Small team (5 people) growing rapidly — meaning every hire has outsized ownership over product, infrastructure, and culture.
- **Remote-First**: Fully distributed team across the US, Canada, Croatia, and India, supporting async and flexible work.
- **Cutting-Edge Domain**: Working at the intersection of AI agent frameworks, web infrastructure, and open source — one of the hottest spaces in tech.
- **Technical Rigor**: Roles are "Member of Technical Staff" (Applied AI / Infrastructure) — signals a focus on deep engineering talent and a flat, high-autonomy structure.
- **Growth Trajectory**: 125% headcount growth YoY and strong open-source traction suggest a well-funded, product-market-fit trajectory.

## Sources
1. [steel.dev](https://steel.dev/)
2. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/steel](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/steel)
3. [GitHub - steel-dev](https://www.github.com/steel-dev)
4. [LinkedIn - steel](https://www.linkedin.com/company/steeldotdev)
5. [Steel Docs](https://docs.steel.dev/overview/intro-to-steel)

## Other roles at Steel

- [Member of Technical Staff - Infrastructure](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-infrastructure-steel-toronto-63pg4npydr4k) — Toronto, Canada
- [Member of Technical Staff - Agents](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-technical-staff-agents-steel-toronto-ypq227rfs74z) — Toronto, Canada
- [Founding Growth Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-growth-lead-kastle-san-francisco-x71qwr2s6j58) — San Francisco, CA
- [Founding Growth Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-growth-lead-pallet-san-francisco-8apvn6ahamfb) — San Francisco, CA / New York, NY
- [Founding Growth Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-growth-lead-unusual-ventures-new-york-kmsxm8vt2jf2) — New York, NY
- [Founding Growth Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-growth-lead-numos-ai-inc-san-francisco-nefhyc97pb07) — San Francisco, CA