Founding Engineer

Ventura builds the AI workforce for distributors and manufacturers, starting with quoting and order entry. It plugs into your existing ERP, follows your SOPs, and learns your team's tribal knowledge - getting smarter with every completed task.

Swen (CEO) — Advised steel, cement, and industrial machinery manufacturers as a consultant at BCG, then co-founded and exited a process automation platform for European wholesale distributors. While doing his MBA at Harvard, he embedded with a $2bn distributor to build their AI sales automation from scratch. That became Ventura.

Jack (CTO) — Has been building with AI Language Models since before they became large. Founding Engineer at Develop Health, where he automated back-office operations in healthcare with AI - the same class of problems we're solving for distributors. The company scaled from zero to $7M ARR in 14 months with a team of 5.

Technology is no longer the limiting factor for automating knowledge work. Deployment is. A frontier lab ships a capability, and 18 months later a handful of Fortune 500s have it in production and everyone else has a pilot. The gap isn't model quality. It's that deploying AI into a real business means learning a workflow nobody wrote down, integrating with software from 2003, and hitting a reliability bar the model alone doesn't meet.

Ventura closes the deployment gap for industrial operations, as a configurable product, not a consulting engagement. We started with one product: quoting and order entry for industrial distributors. We're live with customers doing billions in revenue, moving thousands of truckloads of material across the U.S. every day.

Those customers are already asking us to automate the next five processes. Growth is limited by how much we can ship, not by demand. We're hiring founding engineers, full time, in person in SF.

Founders

Swen (CEO): exited a B2B SaaS in the same industry, ex-BCG, Harvard MS/MBA. Jack (CTO): founding engineer at Develop Health (0 → $7m ARR with 5 people), creator of Magentic, Imperial College London.

You'd be our first founding engineer.

What you'd actually do

You’ll own problems end to end: talk to customers, understand how they work, decide what we should build, and then build it. You’ll work across customer-facing features, AI agents, integrations, and infrastructure. Along the way, you’ll improve the evals, tests, and tooling that make each new customer implementation faster and more reliable.

Your first three months with us

• Week one: shipped your first feature to a live customer
• Month one: got on a call with a customer, designed and implemented a feature to solve a problem for them
• Quarter one: owning a meaningful surface area of the product, end to end

You

• Full stack experience: NextJS, TypeScript, Python, Google Cloud
• Understand how to build production-ready agents: context engineering, tool design, evals, …
• Can talk directly with customers, ask good questions, and get to the root of their problems
• Ship fast without lowering the quality bar
• Stay on the bleeding edge of AI tools to increase leverage, without outsourcing their engineering judgment
• Like owning the whole problem rather than working from a narrowly defined backlog

We fully support visa sponsorship and relocation to San Francisco. We’ll help with anything that prevents you from doing your best work.