Founding Engineer
Founding Engineer at Lucent — San Francisco, CA, US
- Company: Lucent
- Location: San Francisco, CA, US
- Employment type: FULL_TIME
- Salary: USD 120000–160000 / year
- Posted: 2026-07-17
About this role
You'll be working directly with the founder across the full stack - but your deepest impact will be on the backend and infrastructure that powers everything. As we grow from dozens to thousands of customers, the hard problems become - how do you process millions of user sessions reliably, cheaply, and fast?
This is a hands-on, high-ownership role. You'll make architectural decisions and build systems that are production-grade from day one.
About the Founder
Founded by repeat founder Alisa Rae. Before Lucent, Alisa sold an Australian EdTech company, was employee #2 at MagicBrief (acquired by Canva), and was a Software Engineer at Atlassian.
Lucent is founded on her conviction that the way software teams understand their users is fundamentally broken, and that the team who builds the ground truth layer for user behavior will define how products are built for the next decade. She's looking for a founding member who shares that belief and wants to build it with her.
What You'll Build
Scalable ingestion and processing pipelines that handle session replay data at high volume across many concurrent customers
The job queue and worker infrastructure that drives Lucent's AI analysis engine
Multi-tenant architecture with strong data isolation, audit logging, and the foundations for SOC 2
PostHog API integration infrastructure, and the extensible connector layer for future replay providers (FullStory, Amplitude, Microsoft Clarity)
Observability, alerting, and on-call tooling
Internal tooling
About You
You know how to build and manage teams of coding agents
Exceptional at backend and infrastructure engineering
Moves fast
Experience with query optimization, schema design, migrations
Comfortable owning cloud infrastructure end-to-end - deployments, networking, cost, reliability
High agency
Bonus points:
Watched a lot of session replays before
What We Offer
Above-market equity. If you're excited about building something that compounds, this is the role.
Work directly with the founder
Health, dental, vision
SF in-person + flexibility