On 14 October 2026, the title “founding engineer” covered an equity-only role in Hyderabad, a ₹30L to ₹50L role in Bengaluru, and a YC listing that welcomed new graduates. Searching the phrase from India mostly returns US listings, recruiter posts and roles that closed months ago, which hides how varied the real Indian openings are.
The roles exist. Some sit on a handful of startup boards. Many are never posted, because the founder hasn’t settled on hiring yet, or is asking friends and investors for names first. Both halves matter, and this page takes them in turn: where the listed roles are, and how to reach the founder for the unlisted ones.
What is a founding engineer?
A founding engineer is one of a startup’s first engineering hires, usually among the first few, who builds the core product with the founders and sets how engineering works for everyone hired later. It is a job title, not a co-founder seat, though it often carries more equity than a later hire.
The listings say it more concretely than any definition. Tsenta’s YC listing for a Bengaluru founding engineer says “you’d be our first full time engineering hire” and asks the person to “Set the engineering bar for everyone we hire after you.” Nexera’s Wellfound listing in Bengaluru describes the role as “shaping our technology stack, engineering culture, and product architecture” for someone “comfortable with ambiguity”. Bozzo, hiring in Hyderabad, says you will “work directly alongside the founders to architect, build, and scale our core technology across web and mobile platforms.”
Three things separate it from a normal senior engineer role:
- No spec. Tsenta’s listing puts it plainly: “You won’t be handed a spec.”
- Breadth. You will touch the backend, the frontend, the deploy and sometimes the customer call in the same week.
- Equity in place of some salary. Most founding listings in the sample below show an equity range, and one is equity only.
Where are founding engineer jobs in India posted?
Mostly in two places, plus the careers pages of startups that just raised. Each works a little differently.
YC’s jobs pages. Y Combinator publishes city pages for its companies’ open roles. The page titled “Jobs at Y Combinator startups in Bengaluru” lists roles at YC companies there, and there is a matching page for India as a whole. Each listing shows the company’s YC batch, salary and equity where given, and the minimum experience. Applying goes through YC Work at a Startup, where one profile covers every YC company.
Wellfound. Wellfound’s India location pages list startup roles by city, with the salary range, equity range and years of experience on each card. There is no separate founding engineer filter that we could find, so search the city page and scan titles for “founding”. Open each listing: the header shows whether it was posted or reposted, and how long ago.
Careers pages after a raise. A startup that announced a seed round this month may not have posted anywhere yet. Its careers page, or the founder’s own post about the raise, is often the first place the role appears. The funding and launch feeds worth watching are listed in finding startups before they post roles.
Which startups in India have founding engineer roles open?
This is a sample, checked by hand on 14 October 2026, not a full list. Hiring changes weekly: a listing can close the day after we checked it, and some older listings stay up after the role is filled. Open each one before you apply.
| Company | Role | Location | Experience asked | Pay on the listing | Where |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Atrisa (YC P26) | Founding AI / ML Engineer | Bengaluru, hybrid | 3+ years | $30K to $60K, 0.10% to 2.00% | YC |
| Tsenta (YC S26) | Founding Engineer | Bengaluru | 3+ years | ₹7.5M to ₹15M | YC |
| Cardboard (YC W26) | Founding Design Engineer | Bengaluru / San Francisco | Any (new grads ok) | Not given | YC |
| Bozzo | Founding Engineer - Equity Only | Hyderabad, in office | 1 year | 0.5% to 4.0% equity, no salary listed | Wellfound, posted 1 month ago |
| Koreon AI | Founding Engineer, Compiler / ML Systems | Bengaluru, San Francisco, Shanghai or remote (India included) | 8 years | $80k to $150k, 0.5% to 1.5% | Wellfound, posted 1 month ago |
| Bynd | Founding Full-Stack Engineer | Gurgaon, in office | 4 years | ₹20L to ₹50L, 0.5% to 1.5% | Wellfound, reposted 6 months ago |
| Nexera | Founding Engineer | Bengaluru, in office | 1 year | ₹30L to ₹50L, 0.5% to 5.0% | Wellfound, reposted 9 months ago |
| Boock.ai | Founding Full Stack Software Engineer (MERN) | Remote, India | 3 years | ₹4L to ₹7L, no equity | Wellfound, reposted 6 months ago |
Two things stand out. The pay spread is wide: from an equity-only role to ₹50L plus equity, under the same title. And the experience asked runs from “new grads ok” to eight years. “Founding engineer” tells you the stage of the company, not the level of the job, so read the listing before you decide it is out of reach or beneath you.
The “reposted” dates matter too. A listing reposted nine months ago may still be open, or it may be a standing post the founder no longer reads. That is one more reason to find the founder’s email and write directly.
What do founders look for in a founding engineer?
Mostly evidence that you can own something without supervision, and that they would want to work next to you every day. The listings repeat the same few things.
- Ownership. Nexera wants someone to “Take full ownership of projects with minimal oversight”. Tsenta wants you to “Ship to production in your first week and own a user-visible metric within your first month.”
- Shipped work in their area. Atrisa asks for experience “building agents that call tools, manage state, and carry out multi-step tasks”. Tsenta asks for “LLMs past the tutorial stage.” The common thread is production work, not coursework.
- Talking to users. Tsenta’s listing says “You actually want to talk to users.” At a company with no product manager, the engineer often is the product manager.
- Fit with the founders. This one is rarely written down, but it decides most hires.
Founder writing explains why fit weighs so much. Sam Altman’s Startup Playbook tells founders “Don’t compromise on the quality of people you hire” and “Trust your gut on people. If you have doubt, then the answer is no.” It also says “Be generous with equity, trust, and responsibility.”
How do founders fill their first engineering seats?
Largely through people they already know, or people who reached them directly. That is the most useful fact on this page for a job seeker.
Harj Taggar, now a Managing Partner at YC, wrote YC’s guide “How to Hire Your First Engineer”. It tells founders: “For your first three engineering hires I’d recommend focusing exclusively on personal network hiring.” On job boards it is blunt: “most job sites aren’t frequented by high-quality engineers. They’ll get you volume, not quality”. Founders who follow that advice are asking friends, former colleagues and investors for names before they post anything.
You cannot join a founder’s personal network overnight. You can do the next closest thing: become a specific person the founder has heard from, with a specific reason to talk, before the role reaches a board. A good email does that. A one-click application to a busy posting does not.
The same guide notes, from the founder’s side, that cold outreach needs persistence: “expect it’ll take two or three emails before you get a reply.” The same is true when you are the one writing.
How do you get a founding engineer role at a startup?
- Pick a lane. Choose one or two areas where your work is real: payments, AI agents, developer tools, logistics. Founders hire for “has done this before”, so a narrow lane beats a long list.
- Make your proof easy to open. One public repo, a short write-up of a system you built, or a demo. Put the link in the first three lines of anything you send.
- Build a list of 20 to 30 startups. Recent seed or pre-seed raises in your lane, plus companies already listing founding roles on YC’s jobs pages or Wellfound.
- Apply where a role is posted. One YC Work at a Startup profile reaches every YC company; on Wellfound, apply to the listings that fit.
- Write to the founder anyway. For every company on the list, posted role or not, send a short note to a founder. For the address itself, see finding a startup founder’s email.
- Send a second note, and perhaps a third. A few days later, in the same thread, with something new: a bug you noticed, a feature you tried, a relevant result.
- Prepare for a different interview. Expect a call with the founder, a take-home or paid trial, and questions about how you decide what to build. Ask about runway, the equity vesting schedule and who you would report to.
Steps 3, 5 and 6 are the ones that take hours each week, and the ones most people drop.
Where to start if the founding role isn’t posted yet
Start with Backdoor. Founding roles sit at exactly the companies it looks at. Its site pitches it at people heading for pre-seed to Series C startups, and says its emails often reach the founder before any role is posted.
It takes on steps 3, 5 and 6 like this:
- The list. Every morning it goes through funding news, careers pages, GitHub, Wellfound, Crunchbase, TechCrunch, Product Hunt and Y Combinator, and shortlists startups that have just raised, launched or begun hiring and that suit your background. A company that closed a seed round this week may be about to hire its first engineers.
- The note. It works out the founder’s address and writes a first pass on why your background suits that company. Nothing leaves without your approval; in the site’s words, “Every new email waits for your SEND.” So the line only you can write, the system you built that maps to their problem, goes in first.
- The follow-up. Approved notes leave from your Gmail account, later nudges go into that same thread until a founder responds, and a text tells you when one does.
Backdoor also publishes a free hiring list, which it says holds 2,000+ hiring contacts across 320+ companies, mostly startups in India, open without signing up. If you would rather write the first few notes by hand, start there. Its morning matches, the research on your profile and intros to partner startups that are hiring also cost nothing.
You pay only to send: in India, seven days of outreach cost ₹999 once, and the pass does not renew. For roles that are already posted, keep the YC and Wellfound applications running alongside it.
If the founding role is at a YC company
If the startups you want are YC companies, YC Work at a Startup takes one profile and lets you apply to any of them, and YC says founders can contact you directly. Several of the Bengaluru founding roles above are listed there. The limit is scope: it covers YC-funded companies only, and not every YC company uses it.
If you want the salary and equity range before you write
Wellfound carried most of the Indian founding listings in our sample, from Hyderabad to Gurgaon, and shows salary and equity ranges up front, so you can drop what does not fit before you write. Applying is free for candidates. Its pages say nothing we could find about chasing a reply on your behalf, so the follow-ups stay with you.
| Tool | Emails founders | Sends from Gmail | Follow-ups | Free plan |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Backdoor | Finds founder emails and drafts notes Verified | Sends approved emails via your connected Gmail Verified | Follows up in the same thread until a reply Verified | Discovery, research, resume and partner-startup intros are free, plus a free hiring list (mostly startups in India); you pay only for active outreach Verified |
| YC Work at a Startup | Not publicly documented | Not publicly documented | Not publicly documented | Free sign-up with one profile for YC startups Verified |
| Wellfound | Not publicly documented | Not publicly documented | Not publicly documented | Free for candidates (profile and applying) Verified |
A note to a pre-seed logistics founder in Bengaluru
Context. A Bengaluru logistics startup announced a pre-seed round last week. Its two founders are non-technical operators, and the careers page says “engineers, coming soon”. Founder: Kavya.
Subject: First engineer for your dispatch product
Hi Kavya,
Congrats on the pre-seed. I read that you are building dispatch software for mid-size fleets in Karnataka and plan to hire your first engineers.
For three years I have built the routing and driver-app backend at a 40-person logistics company in Pune: Node, Postgres and a lot of patchy GPS data. The service I rebuilt cut failed delivery assignments by about a fifth. I would like to build the first version of yours.
Code and a short write-up are here: github.com/example/route-batching
Could we talk for 20 minutes this week?
Rohan
The follow-up, sent on day four.
Hi Kavya, something I noticed since: your demo video shows drivers re-entering the same address twice. I handled that with a small address cache, and can walk through it on a call.
Rohan
The shape: one reason to write now (the raise), one result in their domain, a link to proof, one small ask. The second email brings a new observation rather than a reminder.
For your own version, replace the result with your closest match to their product, and keep the whole first email under 100 words.
Two lists to build before Friday: posted founding roles and fresh seed rounds
Open YC’s Bengaluru jobs page and Wellfound’s India pages, and note every listing with “founding” in the title that matches your lane. Apply to the ones that fit, and set up your YC Work at a Startup profile if it does not exist yet.
Then build the second list: ten startups in your lane that raised in the last month. Write to a founder at each, by hand or through Backdoor, and put a follow-up date next to every name. The posted roles are only part of this market; YC’s own advice to founders sends them to people they know before any job board, so being someone they have heard from matters. If founder-side roles interest you more than engineering, founders office jobs covers the non-engineering version of working next to the founder.
How we chose
We compare tools on what their own public pages say, checked on the dates shown, and label every claim. How we compare tools.
FAQ
Founding engineer jobs india
On 14 October 2026, YC's Bengaluru jobs page listed founding engineering roles at Atrisa, Tsenta and Cardboard, and Wellfound listed them at Bozzo in Hyderabad and Koreon AI (Bengaluru or remote from India), among others. Search both for the word "founding" in the job title, then open each listing to check the location, experience and equity. Listings change weekly, and many founding roles are filled before they are posted, so also write to founders at startups that have just raised.
How to get founding engineer role at a startup
Show shipped work that is close to what the startup builds, then write a short note to the founder that names one problem you could own in your first month. Founders hire their first engineers largely through people they know or have heard from directly, so a specific email often beats a cold application. Apply to posted roles on YC's jobs pages and Wellfound too, and follow up once if you hear nothing.
Sources checked
Show 15 sources
- Jobs at Y Combinator startups in Bengaluru | Y Combinator, checked
- Jobs at Y Combinator startups in India | Y Combinator, checked
- Founding AI / ML Engineer at Atrisa | Y Combinator, checked
- Founding Engineer at Tsenta | Y Combinator, checked
- Founding Design Engineer at Cardboard | Y Combinator, checked
- Founding Engineer - Equity Only at Bozzo | Wellfound, checked
- Founding Full-Stack Engineer at Bynd | Wellfound, checked
- Founding Engineer at Nexera | Wellfound, checked
- Founding Engineer, Compiler / ML Systems at Koreon AI | Wellfound, checked
- Founding Full Stack Software Engineer (MERN) at Boock.ai | Wellfound, checked
- India Jobs - Tech & Startup Jobs | Wellfound, checked
- How to Hire Your First Engineer (Harj Taggar, Y Combinator, 21 August 2018), checked
- Startup Playbook (Sam Altman), checked
- Backdoor: AI job agent that emails startup founders for you, checked
- Backdoor free hiring list, checked