Full-Stack Engineer — Contour

Contour — Full-Stack Engineer

Type: Full-time | On-site | San Francisco, CA Compensation: $200,000–$320,000 + competitive equity Hiring count: 2 Visa sponsorship: Yes — H-1B, O-1, OPT open for the right candidate Reports to: The founders (two co-founders)

About Contour

Contour is building the AI operating layer for forward-deployed engineering (FDE) and professional services teams, helping teams run deliveries more smoothly and efficiently as demand for implementation work surges across every industry. They are reinventing a $400B+ implementation market.

Seed-stage, based in San Francisco, raised $11.2M co-led by Lightspeed Ventures and Chemistry. Team of 5 full-time plus 3 interns (two founding engineers, one founding operations person, and the two co-founders). One co-founder previously built a voice agent startup (YC W24), was an early product and business hire at Cartesia (helping grow it from zero to multiple millions in ARR), and invested at Chemistry, where they saw the FDE scaling challenge firsthand across portfolio companies. The other co-founder was the first founding engineer and later head of engineering at Conversion (an AI enterprise marketing company), leading a 15-person engineering team and building roughly half of that company's product.

Founded: 2026 | Team size: 5 full-time + 3 interns | Total funding: $11.2M Industry: AI Tools Website: usecontour.ai Office: San Francisco

Why Candidates Should Join

• Founding-level ownership: Own and lead engineering projects across the product and report directly to the founders.
• Strong backing, big market: Seed-stage with $11.2M co-led by Lightspeed and Chemistry, reinventing a $400B+ implementation market.
• Real greenfield + AI depth: Build genuinely greenfield products from scratch and work hands-on with agentic workflows, retrieval over unstructured enterprise data, and production LLM evaluation.

Intake Call Summary

Intake video present on the role page but not transcribed — points below are drawn from the written role copy.

• Company is heavily bottlenecked on full-stack build capacity right now — this is a build/capacity hire.
• Full-stack leaning with meaningful frontend work; one platform being built is customer-facing, so product taste matters alongside engineering depth.
• Engineers make decisions that directly affect the customer product, but this is not a customer-facing seat: no calls with customers, no hiring responsibilities.
• Codebase spans phases: some polished and built for scale, some genuinely greenfield — comfort building from scratch is important.
• Reports to the founders.

The Role

Contour is hiring Full-Stack Engineers to own and lead engineering projects across the company's product offerings, working closely with customer-facing teams to build systems that solve critical implementation problems.

What You'll Be Doing

• Craft interfaces trusted by enterprise teams on their most critical workflows
• Engineer agentic workflows that stay performant under real-world load
• Architect the full stack behind high-performance applications
• Retrieve information over large corpora of unstructured enterprise data
• Evaluate LLMs across the application layer to determine what actually works in production

Tech stack: Python, TypeScript; agentic workflows, retrieval over unstructured enterprise data, LLM evaluation across the application layer.

Requirements

• 3+ years strong programming experience
• Python + TypeScript
• Full-stack with meaningful frontend/product work
• SF in-person, 5-6 days
• Missionary, not mercenary mindset

Green Flags

• Startup experience with high ownership, ideally taking a project from early stage through meaningful growth
• Genuine passion for building: side projects, personal builds, or things created outside of work
• Comfortable building greenfield products from scratch, not just extending existing systems
• Strong product taste and customer intuition, especially relevant given customer-facing product surfaces
• Missionary mindset: driven by genuine interest in the problem, not just the paycheck

Red Flags

• Career built entirely at large companies with no startup or high-ownership chapter
• Cannot work SF in-person 5-6 days a week or is unwilling to flex on weekends around customer deadlines
• Purely mercenary motivation without genuine interest in the product or mission
• No evidence of independent building or initiative beyond assigned work

Details

• Location: San Francisco, CA
• Work policy: On-site, 5-6 days/week, start-up hours with weekend availability as needed
• Compensation: $200,000–$320,000 + equity
• Visa sponsorship: H-1B, O-1, OPT open for the right candidate
• Employment type: Full-time

Screening Questions

None specified on the Contrario role page.

Interview Process

Stage 1 — Pending Approval — Candidate awaiting initial approval. Stage 2 — First Round — First round with a founder: background and project discussion. Stage 3 — Technical Screening — Technical screening with the other co-founder: a real problem the team is currently working through, systems-design focused. Stage 4 — Work Trial — Weekend trial. Stage 5 — Offer Extended — Offer has been extended. Stage 6 — Candidate Hired — Candidate accepts and starts.