Founding Engineer, Applied AI

Golden Gate Recruiting is hiring a Founding Engineer, Applied AI for Monarch, an AI-native freight brokerage in Berkeley backed by SV Angel, Browder Capital, Z Fellows, Collective Global, and Symphony VC!

Location: Berkeley, CA (Bay Area office). In person

Compensation: ~$100K base + meaningful equity (founding role). New grads welcome

Own the agent orchestration behind a real business: many AI agents working in parallel to move physical goods from point A to point B.

About Monarch

Monarch is an AI-native freight brokerage, backed by SV Angel, Browder Capital, Z Fellows, Collective Global, Symphony VC, and industry angels. Dealerships nationwide ship with Monarch, including Mercedes, Cadillac, and Land Rover, alongside luxury car clubs. The team comes from UC Berkeley CS, AI research, and investment banking. Learn more at https://usemonarch.ai/

About The Role

Monarch is hiring a founding engineer focused on applied AI. This is a builder's role working directly with the CEO.

The core of the role is agent orchestration. Every shipment runs through a sequence of work: quoting, finding and dispatching a carrier, tracking the load, and keeping the customer and carrier informed. Each step is handled by AI agents, with many shipments in motion at once.

This isn't a chatbot. The agents negotiate with carriers, make phone calls, update customers, track vehicles, handle exceptions, and coordinate payments. Shipments run for days, external systems fail, humans respond asynchronously, and dozens or hundreds of workflows are active at the same time. You'll design the state, orchestration, retries, observability, evals, and human-in-the-loop systems that make this work.

What You'll Do

• Build the agent orchestration: how agents start, hand off work, share state, and recover when something fails

• Build and improve the agents across quoting, dispatch, tracking, and communication

• Design for many agents running in parallel, with tooling to see what each one is doing and why

• Measure quality with evals and real shipment outcomes

• Own features from idea to production, including the unglamorous parts

• Work with operations to turn manual work into product

What We're Looking For

• Strong engineering fundamentals and a record of shipping real products end to end

• Hands-on experience building with LLMs: agents, tool use, evals, voice, or messaging

• Experience with agent orchestration, or a clear, well-reasoned view of how you'd build it

• Extreme comfort working with parallel agents, including running multiple coding agents in parallel day to day

• High ownership in an early-stage setting where there's no spec

• Real interest in the business itself

Exceptional new grads and early-career engineers are encouraged to apply. More experienced engineers are welcome too.

Values

Urgency, Ownership, Integrity, Intelligence

How We Work

• In person at the Bay Area office

• Startup schedule and fast pace, not nine to five

• Real ownership of the core system and a founding role

How To Apply

Send a short note about what you've built, plus your resume, GitHub, or LinkedIn. Links to things you've shipped matter more than a polished resume.

Excited? Apply here or reach out to Rachel at [email protected]!