Airtree is a venture capital firm backing Aussie and Kiwi founders, building the iconic technology companies of tomorrow. As one of the largest and most active early-stage investors in Australia and New Zealand, Airtree’s 120+ portfolio features the region’s breakout tech companies, including Canva, Go1, Employment Hero, Pet Circle, Immutable and Linktree. We are backing a new wave of technically ambitious AI companies at pre-seed and seed stage. Across our portfolio, founders are building foundational AI products—from program synthesis and ML-driven systems to deeply technical, user-facing applications—and are looking for exceptional Founding Engineers to join them at the very beginning.
This is an Expression of Interest for engineers who want to help define the technical and product DNA of a company from day one. You will be employed directly by one of our portfolio companies, work directly with founders, operate with significant autonomy, and have outsized ownership in businesses that are aiming to define new categories.
- Join as an early technical leader, not “employee #25”
- Direct influence over architecture, product direction, and engineering culture
- Work on hard, unsolved problems in AI, ML, systems, and developer tooling
- Competitive early-stage equity and meaningful long-term upside
- Opportunities across infrastructure-heavy, research-driven, and product-led AI companies
- Some roles are forward-deployed, working closely with customers on real-world deployments
You are drawn to complex, low-level problems and large-scale systems.
Backgrounds we’re excited by
- Experience with distributed systems, databases, networking layers, or infrastructure at scale
- Work on performance-critical systems, execution environments, or complex runtimes
- Experience from companies with large-scale infrastructure environments
What you might work on
- Scaling and hardening program synthesis or execution environments
- Designing fault-tolerant, high-performance systems from first principles
- Building infrastructure that supports ML or AI workloads at scale
You care deeply about correctness, abstraction, and language design.
Backgrounds we’re excited by
- PhD or equivalent depth in programming languages, program analysis, or program synthesis
- Experience building compilers, interpreters, or language tooling
What you might work on
- Designing or extending languages and DSLs
- Program synthesis systems and tooling
- Deep static or dynamic analysis at the core of AI-driven products
You enjoy building intelligent systems that learn, adapt, and generate.
Backgrounds we’re excited by
- Experience with reinforcement learning, robotics, or autonomous systems
- Work on code-generation, synthesis, or ML-driven reasoning systems
- Strong applied ML skills paired with solid software engineering fundamentals
What you might work on
- Training and deploying learning systems in production
- Bridging research and real-world product constraints
- Building ML-driven systems that directly power customer outcomes
You are a strong end-to-end engineer who cares deeply about usability and craft.
Backgrounds we’re excited by
- Experience shipping technical products with excellent user experiences
- Comfort moving across frontend, backend, and infrastructure as needed
What you might work on
- Translating complex AI capabilities into intuitive products
- Owning features end-to-end from concept to production
- In some companies, acting as a forward-deployed engineer, working closely with customers to shape the product in real environments
RequirementsWho These Roles Are For
- Engineers who want founder-level responsibility and impact
- People comfortable with ambiguity and rapid iteration
- Builders who care about both technical excellence and real-world outcomes
- Candidates who are excited by early-stage risk in exchange for learning, ownership, and upside
- Engineers looking for highly structured environments or narrow scopes
- Those seeking incremental improvements on mature systems
- People uninterested in equity-heavy compensation or early-stage dynamics
By submitting an Expression of Interest, you’ll be considered for multiple founding engineer opportunities across our AI-focused portfolio. We will match candidates to companies based on technical profile, interests, and stage fit, and make warm introductions directly to founders where there is strong alignment.
If you are motivated by hard problems, early ownership, and the chance to help define the next generation of AI companies from the ground up, we would love to hear from you.
