Founding Engineer

At Damasqas, we are on a mission to replace on-call. We are building an AI SRE that triages alerts, investigates incidents, and remediates autonomously, so engineers stop getting paged at 3am for things a machine can fix.

Right now we're going heavy on voice AI as the opening wedge: building LiveKit observability for agent fleets and working hands-on with a Series B design partner handling 5 million calls per day.

We are a VC-backed startup based in the Toronto area. Small team, real production customers already on V1, and a clear path from "AI that answers reliability questions in Slack" to "AI that rolls back bad deploys before you wake up." We're looking for a founding engineer to build the next layers of the stack alongside us.

About the Role

We're seeking a Founding Engineer to join us in person. You'll be shipping the core product from scratch: deep MCP integrations with monitoring and deployment platforms, the investigation agent, and the remediation engine.

This is a startup, so the work shifts with what the customer and the product need. Some weeks are heads-down on the agent loop. Other weeks you're in a design partner's Slack channel debugging a live incident with them. And because our customers span wildly different industries and tech stacks, from voice AI at Series B scale to fintech backends to healthcare infrastructure, you'll touch it all. Python, Go, Rust, Kubernetes, Postgres, Kafka, niche vendor APIs you've never heard of. By year one you'll have seen more production architectures than most engineers see in a decade.

We're already operating at real production scale through our voice AI design partner, and the problems reflect it. Cascading failures across agent fleets, deploy correlation in seconds, multi-tenant blast radius, auto-remediation that doesn't make things worse. The work is genuinely hard. It's also the kind of hard that compounds: every problem you solve here is one no one has shipped a clean answer to yet.

You'll be successful in this role if you:

* Are a relentlessly resourceful engineer with experience building real-world applications, with a high bar for quality.

* Use the latest tools (Opus 4.7, Cursor, opencode, whatever ships next week) to hit absurd levels of productivity.

* Have personally built something people use, years of experience is basically irrelevant.

* Can go from 0 to 1 building agentic AI systems. You've shipped something where an LLM is actually driving behaviour, not just answering questions: tool use, multi-step reasoning, evals, the whole loop.

* Love debugging weird production problems and feel at home in logs, traces, and deploy histories.

* Enjoy learning and working in a very fast-paced environment.

* Work well on a small team.

What You'll Be Doing:

* Owning entire systems end to end. You'll architect, design, build, ship, and operate. No handoffs, no product managers translating for you.

* Whiteboarding with the founder on the hardest open problems: how we detect fleet-wide voice agent failures, how we correlate deploys to incidents across tenants, how we remediate without making it worse.

* Building and shipping new layers of the AI SRE stack: integrations, monitoring, investigation, and remediation.

* Designing and improving the agent loop that actually resolves incidents end to end.

* Engaging directly with design partners to troubleshoot production issues, including jumping into their Slack channels and hopping on calls when needed.

* Making real calls on architecture, tech stack, and product direction. Your opinions will shape what Damasqas becomes.

Bonus points

* Prior experience as a founder or founding engineer. You know what it feels like to ship with no safety net.

* Strong product taste. You've killed features you built because they weren't good enough, not because someone told you to.

* Experience with voice AI infrastructure (LiveKit, Pipecat, Vapi, Retell, Deepgram, Cartesia, ElevenLabs). You understand what STT, LLM, and TTS latency actually feel like in production.

* Deep in the TypeScript/Node ecosystem. You've built with MCP servers, streaming APIs, and long-running agent processes.

* Production LLM evals experience, or strong opinions on why most eval frameworks miss the point.

Why Join Damasqas?

* Zero bureaucracy.

* Growth Opportunities: As we scale, you'll have the chance to grow with us, taking on new challenges and advancing your career rapidly.

* Real ownership from day one: you're not maintaining someone else's legacy codebase, you're building the thing.

* Direct line to customers: you'll see your code running in production at real Series A/B companies within days of shipping.

* World-class mentorship. Our angels are heads of engineering and directors at X/Twitter, Mixpanel, and Google, plus operators inside the top AI startups. They mentor actively, not passively.

* A network that compounds. Whatever you do after Damasqas, the doors will be open. This role opens paths at any company you'd want to work at next.

Benefits:

* High equity as the first engineering hire.

* Top-of-market cash. Damasqas is staying deliberately lean, which means each engineer carries real weight, and the comp reflects it.

* Signing bonus.

* $2,000 office setup bonus. Monitor, chair, keyboard, desk, whatever makes you ship from day one.

* Daily lunch and dinner stipend.

* Health and wellness benefits.

* Off-sites, retreats, and events.

Our values:

Modelled on Amazon's Leadership Principles, which we think are the best operating framework ever written for engineering cultures that actually ship. The ones we hold hardest:

* Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit. Push back hard when you think something is wrong. Once the call is made, commit fully.

* Customer Obsession. We start from the customer's problem, not the tech we want to build.

* Ownership. You own outcomes, not just the slice of the repo you wrote.

* Bias for Action. Speed matters. Most decisions are reversible. Don't wait for perfect information.

* Dive Deep. No detail is beneath you. You read the logs, inspect the traces, check the actual data.

Most importantly: have fun. Building at a startup is intense, but it's the most fulfilling and challenging time of your life.

If you have any questions, reach out at [email protected] - Founder @Damasqas