Build the system that builds software
Forged is hiring exceptional engineers to help us build an AI platform for planning, creating, shipping, and continuously improving software products.
We are building for founders who understand the business they want to create but need help translating that vision into a coherent product.
Forged turns founder intent into structured product plans, implementation-ready work, and shipped code. It maintains context across product decisions, customer needs, workflows, the roadmap, the codebase, and the live software so that each new improvement builds on what came before it.
We are early, ambitious, and building the foundation now.
Why Forged
AI is making code generation dramatically faster and less expensive. But generating code is only one part of building a successful software product.
The harder questions are moving upstream:
- What should be built?
- Who is it for?
- How should it work?
- What assumptions need to be resolved?
- How should new work fit into the existing product?
- What should improve after the product is live?
Forged is building the persistent operating environment around those decisions.
Our platform helps founders move from an initial goal to a structured product plan, approve what should be built, coordinate AI agents to implement it, and use real-world feedback to decide what comes next.
We are not building another chat interface that produces isolated code.
We are building a system that understands the product.
What you will work on
As one of our first engineers, you will help shape both the product and the technical foundation of the company.
Depending on your role, you may work on:
- Multi-agent systems that plan, implement, test, review, and improve software
- Persistent product and codebase context
- Repository analysis and secure code execution
- Product planning and specification systems
- Agent orchestration, evaluation, and observability
- Sandboxed development environments
- GitHub and deployment integrations
- Human approval and review workflows
- Infrastructure for running long-lived, stateful AI workflows
- The user experience through which founders direct the entire process
The boundaries between product, AI, infrastructure, and application engineering are intentionally fluid. Everyone on the early team will influence what we build and how we build it.
How we work
Start with the product
Technical sophistication matters, but it is only useful when it solves a real product problem. We expect engineers to understand the user, question assumptions, and contribute to product decisions.
Own outcomes
You will not receive narrowly defined tickets and disappear into an implementation queue. You will own meaningful parts of the product from initial reasoning through production.
Build durable systems
AI products can become collections of prompts, special cases, and fragile workflows. We care about clear abstractions, observable systems, reliable behavior, and architecture that improves as the product grows.
Move quickly without lowering the bar
We are early and need to ship. We also know that security, reliability, and product coherence become harder to add later. We aim to make deliberate decisions quickly.
Use AI as part of the engineering process
We expect engineers to use modern AI development tools extensively. The goal is not to replace judgment. It is to increase the amount and quality of work a small team can accomplish.
Open positions
Explore the roles below.
Founding AI Systems Engineer
You will build the intelligence layer that turns product intent into reliable, coordinated action. This role sits at the intersection of large language models, agent architecture, software engineering, and product systems. You will design workflows that help Forged understand a product, clarify ambiguous requests, create implementation plans, coordinate coding agents, evaluate results, and improve over time.
What you will do
- Design and implement multi-agent workflows for product planning and software development
- Build systems for managing context across conversations, product decisions, repositories, and implementation history
- Develop planning, decomposition, tool-use, model selection, and prompting capabilities
- Create evaluation systems and design recovery paths for incomplete, incorrect, or ambiguous agent output
- Work closely with the product and infrastructure layers to ship complete user-facing capabilities
- Help define the technical direction of the AI platform
You may be a strong fit if you have
- Strong software engineering fundamentals
- Experience building production systems with large language models
- Experience with agent frameworks, tool use, retrieval, planning systems, or model evaluation
- A rigorous approach to testing nondeterministic systems
- The ability to turn research concepts into reliable product behavior
Particularly relevant experience
- LLM evaluation and observability
- Agent memory or context management
- Coding agents or automated software engineering
- Structured generation and constrained tool use
- Reinforcement learning, fine-tuning, or model adaptation
- Developer tools, compilers, static analysis, or program synthesis
Founding Product Engineer
You will build the primary product experience through which founders plan, review, build, and improve their software. This is a full-stack role for an engineer who cares deeply about product quality. You will turn complex AI workflows into an interface that feels clear, calm, and controllable. The product must help users understand what the system is doing, make meaningful decisions without becoming overwhelmed, and remain in command as increasingly capable agents perform more of the work.
What you will do
- Build end-to-end product features across the frontend, backend, and data model
- Design workflows for ideas, product plans, features, implementation work, approvals, and review
- Create interfaces for long-running agent activity, including real-time progress, review, and intervention
- Make complex system state understandable to non-technical users
- Build collaborative workspace and project management capabilities
- Work directly with the founders to shape product strategy and priorities
You may be a strong fit if you have
- Excellent product and design judgment
- Strong experience building modern web applications
- The ability to own features across the full stack and ship quickly while keeping systems clean
- Experience translating ambiguous user needs into simple product experiences
- A high standard for interaction details, performance, and reliability
Particularly relevant experience
- React, TypeScript, and modern frontend architecture
- Backend application development and API design
- Real-time or event-driven interfaces
- Collaborative products, developer tools, or workflow software
- AI-native user experiences
- Design systems and complex application state
Founding Platform Engineer
You will build the secure execution and infrastructure platform that allows AI agents to work inside real software projects. Forged agents need to inspect repositories, create isolated environments, install dependencies, run tests, modify code, coordinate work, and submit changes safely. These workflows may run for seconds, minutes, or much longer, across many repositories and infrastructure environments. Your job will be to make that execution layer secure, observable, scalable, and dependable.
What you will do
- Build infrastructure for secure, isolated agent execution
- Design systems for cloning, analyzing, modifying, building, and testing repositories
- Develop orchestration, queueing, scheduling, and recovery systems for long-running jobs
- Improve the security boundaries between agents, repositories, credentials, and external services
- Develop GitHub, CI, deployment, and cloud integrations
- Build internal observability for agent actions, infrastructure activity, cost, and performance
You may be a strong fit if you have
- Strong distributed systems and infrastructure engineering experience
- Experience operating production systems in cloud environments
- A deep understanding of containers, process isolation, networking, and access control
- Experience with queues, schedulers, workflow engines, or job execution platforms
- Strong debugging skills and a practical approach to reliability and security
Particularly relevant experience
- Kubernetes, containers, or sandboxed execution
- Cloud infrastructure and infrastructure as code
- Distributed job systems
- GitHub Apps, CI systems, or developer infrastructure
- Zero-trust architecture and credential management
- Observability, tracing, and production incident response
- Secure execution of untrusted or semi-trusted code
What we value across every role
Exceptional ownership
You identify what needs to happen and drive it through completion. You do not wait for every decision to be made for you.
Product judgment
You care about whether the system is solving the right problem, not only whether the implementation works.
Technical rigor
You reason clearly about tradeoffs, test your assumptions, and build systems that can be understood and improved.
High agency
You find a path through unfamiliar problems. You learn quickly, use the tools available, and ask for help when it will accelerate the work.
Clear communication
You can explain technical decisions, disagree constructively, and write clearly enough that important context does not disappear.
Low ego
The best solution matters more than whose idea it was. You can change your mind when the evidence changes.
What you can expect
- Significant ownership from your first day
- Direct involvement in product and company decisions
- The opportunity to shape the architecture of an ambitious AI platform
- A small team with minimal bureaucracy
- Competitive salary and meaningful equity
- Modern equipment and the tools you need to do your best work
- A culture that values focused execution over performative activity
- Periodic in-person working sessions with the team
Specific compensation will depend on experience, role, and location and will be discussed early in the interview process.
Apply
Email careers@tryforged.ai with:
- The position you are interested in
- A brief introduction
- Your résumé or LinkedIn profile
- Links to relevant work, GitHub projects, or technical writing
- A short description of something difficult you built and the part you personally owned
You do not need to write a formal cover letter.
We read every application.
Don't match every requirement?
The strongest early-stage engineers often have unusual backgrounds. You may have built companies, contributed to open-source projects, conducted research, worked on infrastructure at scale, or developed deep expertise outside a traditional software role.
If the work interests you and you believe you can contribute at a high level, apply.
Build what comes after code generation
AI has changed how software is written.
We believe the next major opportunity is changing how software products are understood, planned, built, and improved.
Come build it with us.