Founding Engineer (Agent Orchestration)
About us:
We’re on a mission to expand human agency. At Primitive, we believe that artificial intelligence should amplify analog intelligence, so we’re building an agent orchestration OS that enables human coordination across complex contexts, without compromising elegance or simplicity.
We’re a fast-moving team backed by a top NYC seed investor with an in-residence build program. It’s early days at Primitive, which means new team members have an opportunity to shape our trajectory in big ways.
Primitive is an in-person company based in NYC, and currently requires its employees to come to the office at least three days a week.
Read more about our ‘design for emergence’ philosophy here.
About the role:
We’re looking for a Founding Engineer to join Primitive. You’ll be the second technical hire, working directly with our founder to scale our live prototype into a production system. As a strategic partner in shaping Primitive’s technical foundation, you’ll architect and build the core systems that blend realtime voice, AI agents, composable task graphs, and multiplayer collaboration.
What you’ll achieve:
Ship foundational infrastructure: Scale our stack from prototype to production, implementing robust authentication, multi-tenancy, and performance optimizations needed for thousands of concurrent users.
Build sophisticated AI orchestration: Extend our multi-agent reasoning system with new agent types, improve LLM pipeline performance, and architect proactive background agents that work autonomously across user workflows. You’ll have the opportunity to shape our AI strategy and deepen your expertise in agent architectures as we push the boundaries of what’s possible.
Create seamless integrations: Build and maintain integrations with leading developer and productivity tools, designing flexible integration patterns that can scale to dozens of third-party services using APIs and MCP.
Enable real-time collaboration: Implement multiplayer features, conflict resolution, and real-time synchronization across our graph-based task system to support distributed teams.
Skills you’ll need to bring:
Full-stack fluency: You’re comfortable working across our Django backend and React frontend, with strong TypeScript skills and experience building real-time web applications. You understand database design, API architecture, and modern frontend patterns.
AI/LLM orchestration and integration experience:You have hands-on experience designing and productionizing multi-agent workflows, understand prompt engineering, RAG, and can optimize AI pipelines for both cost and latency. Experience with realtime APIs is a strong plus.
Real-time collaboration architecture: You’ve built systems where multiple actors (human and AI) make concurrent modifications to shared data structures, requiring sophisticated conflict resolution and state synchronization.
Systems thinking: You approach complex problems holistically. You can identify elegant solutions that address multiple challenges in coherent abstractions rather than one-off feature additions.
0→1 product development: You have experience navigating the unique technical challenges of early-stage product development—making pragmatic architecture decisions with incomplete information and building for rapid iteration while maintaining code quality. You understand how to balance technical debt with shipping velocity in the critical early phases of a product.
Integration-heavy architecture: You’ve built systems that consume many third-party APIs, understand rate limiting and webhook handling, and can design integration patterns that are both reliable and maintainable.
User-centric development: You think about how every technical decision impacts user experience. You have experience collaborating closely with designers and researchers.
Proactive communication: You communicate technical decisions clearly in writing and collaborate effectively in a fast-paced environment. You’re comfortable with ambiguity and can drive projects autonomously while keeping cross-functional stakeholders informed in language they understand.
Nice to haves:
You’re proficient with Django + Django Ninja, PostgreSQL, Redis, Celery, React, TanStack Router, TailwindCSS, and the OpenAI Agents SDK.
You’ve built durable workflows with resilience patterns (retries, idempotency, sagas) using tools like Temporal or Airflow, or implemented custom state machines with backoff and circuit breaker logic.
You’ve implemented complex coordination patterns such as dynamic dependency resolution, recursive processing, or event-driven architectures with context passing using systems like Kafka streams or distributed task queues.
You’ve worked on collaborative real-time systems (e.g. collaborative editors, multiplayer games, etc) and understand the complexity of conflict resolution in distributed environments.
You have experience leading or meaningfully directing teams of collaborators.
You’re familiar with the ideas of Douglas Engelbart, Christopher Alexander, Alan Kay, and Seymour Papert. You’re interested in exploring what end-user programming means in the age of AI agents.
Experience: 6+ YOE
Salary: $150-200k
Equity: 0.5-2.5%
Primitive is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on any legally protected characteristics and consider qualified applicants with criminal histories. We’re committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities—please let us know if you need assistance.