Founding Engineer (Summer)— SF, in-person, paid + room & board (YC S26)
Founding Engineer (Summer)— SF, in-person, paid + room & board (YC S26) at Cerenovus — San Francisco, CA, US
- Company: Cerenovus
- Location: San Francisco, CA, US
- Employment type: INTERN
- Salary: USD 3200–6400 / year
- Posted: 2026-07-17
About this role
We're three Harvard sophomores in Y Combinator's S26 batch, building AI agents that turn everything a company produces (email, Slack, docs, CRM) into a living map of how the business actually works. Pilot customers are live. We're hiring two people for the summer — you'd be among the first five engineers on the product.
What you'll do
Build multi-agent ingestion pipelines: email/Slack/CRM/accounting → knowledge graph
Do entity resolution and systems-mapping inference over messy real-world enterprise data
Orchestrate agents on Claude, with an effectively unlimited token budget
Own systems end to end — code you write Monday is in front of a customer Friday
What we're looking for
Strong CS fundamentals — shown through coursework, competitions (USACO/ICPC/CTF), research, or shipped projects
Systems-level thinking: you reason in dataflows and failure modes, not just features
High agency — you've built and shipped things nobody assigned you
Solid in Python and TypeScript/React; Rust or other systems experience is a plus
Hands-on experience with LLM agents (orchestration, tool use, evals) is a big plus
On-site in SF, full-time for the summer, comfortable with very long hours (996)
What you get
Paid monthly + a private room in our SF house + food covered (exact comp on the first call)
The full YC summer: batch events, the speaker series (past batches: Sam Altman, the Airbnb and Stripe founders), Demo Day in September
A founding-engineer conversion path, equity terms in writing at offer stage