🚀 Wildcard (YC W25) is Seeking a Founding Engineer

Wildcard is on a mission to redefine how retail and e-commerce brands navigate the shift toward AI-driven shopping. We are looking for a powerhouse Founding Engineer to join us in San Francisco and build the future of agentic commerce.

📋 Job Overview

---

🌐 What is Wildcard?

Wildcard is an agentic commerce optimization platform. As the world moves away from traditional keyword search and toward AI shopping agents, brands are flying blind. They don't know why they are being recommended (or ignored) by AI.

We are building the "Mission Control" for this new era, focusing on:

• AEO/GEO: AI Engine Optimization & Generative Engine Optimization.
• Visibility: Tracking how products appear to AI agents.
• Execution & Attribution: Connecting AI recommendations to actual revenue.
• Automation: Streamlining how brands monetize AI discovery.

The Shift in Commerce

---

👤 Who You'll Work With

You will partner directly with the founder, Kaushik Mahorker.

"At Scale AI, I developed the e-commerce enrichment engine for a massive pilot involving 400K SKUs, 2.8M attributes, and hundreds of different taxonomies. This work helped secure over $15M in contracts with top-tier marketplaces and retailers. That experience proved that the discovery layer of shopping is being completely rewritten for an AI-first world, and most brands are totally unprepared."

---

🛠️ The Role & Responsibilities

We aren't looking for a cog in a machine; we need a builder who can own the entire lifecycle of the product. You will handle everything from the frontend UI to the depths of browser automation and infrastructure reliability.

🎯 "Week 0" Priority Projects

• Infrastructure: Scaling retrieval and browser orchestration across various AI commerce interfaces.
• Reliability: Implementing robust queues, observability, and retry logic to ensure core workflows don't break.
• Revenue Tracking: Developing attribution systems that prove the incrementality of AI-driven sales.
• Protocol Adaptation: Pivoting the product to align with new agentic commerce protocols and platform updates.
• Agent Development: Building MCP servers and new product surfaces for emerging verticals.
• Scaling: Transitioning "scrappy" MVP code into a scalable production architecture without losing velocity.
• Rapid Iteration: Shipping customer-requested features while balancing the trade-off between speed and perfection.

---

🧬 Candidate Profile

We are looking for a high-agency individual who thrives in ambiguity.

You are a great fit if you:

• Have "Early Stage" DNA: You've founded a company or were an early hire at a Seed, Series A, or B startup.
• Are a Full-Stack Expert: You can ship a feature from the database to the browser independently.
• Leverage AI Tools: You are an expert with AI coding assistants. You use them to move $10\times$ faster, but you never outsource your critical judgment to the LLM.
• Possess "Schlep Tolerance": You are willing to do the unglamorous, tedious work if it's what the business needs to win.
• Are Resilient: You can handle mini-pivots and changing priorities as we learn from the market.
• Think Independently: You can push back on ideas and propose better alternatives while still maintaining a high bias for action.

💻 Preferred Technical Stack

// We value expertise in these areas:
const preferredStack = {
  languages: ["TypeScript", "Node.js"],
  frameworks: ["Express", "React"],
  data: ["Postgres", "Redis"],
  infra: ["Async Job Systems", "Queues", "Browser Automation", "Scraping"],
  ai: ["Context Management", "Orchestration", "Tool Use", "Evals", "MCP Servers"],
  domain: ["E-commerce", "Retail Infra", "Search/Attribution Analytics"]
};

---

🌟 Why Join Wildcard?

In most engineering roles, you are a passenger. At Wildcard, you are the navigator.

1. Extreme Influence: You will shape the architecture, the engineering culture, and the product roadmap from day one.
2. Direct Impact: You will work in tight feedback loops with customers, seeing your code directly impact business outcomes.
3. Ownership: You won't just be "implementing tickets"; you'll be making the decisions that determine if the company succeeds.

Company Quick-Facts

• Founded: 2025
• YC Batch: W25
• Status: Active
• HQ: San Francisco

Ready to build the mission control for agentic commerce? Apply now.