About Drafted

Drafted connects university students to frontier AI labs for data annotation and model training. The thesis is simple: there are over 20 million undergraduates worldwide who represent an untapped middle layer between low-quality, inconsistent gig workers and expensive, hard-to-scale expert contractors. Drafted recruits, trains, and quality-scores that talent pool, then routes it to the labs and enterprises building frontier AI systems.

About The Role

Drafted is hiring its first dedicated engineering hire beyond the founders: a Founding Engineer to own the technical foundation of the platform as it scales past a 15,000-contributor base, an eight-partner contract book, and a path to $15M ARR. Everything currently running, from contributor-facing product to the quality-scoring infrastructure that underpins Drafted's benchmark claims, has been built by the founding team directly. This role exists to take real, load-bearing ownership of that system alongside them.

This is not a role with a pre-defined lane. You will move fluidly across the stack, from product surfaces to the backend systems powering contributor matching and quality scoring, and you will have a direct hand in the architecture decisions that shape how the platform holds up as volume continues to compound.

This is an early-stage company: a small founding team, a lean but fast-growing contributor base, and a pace of change where the scope of this role will look meaningfully different in six months than it does today. Ownership, judgment under ambiguity, and a willingness to build process rather than wait for it are more important here than prior title or company size.

Core Responsibilities

Architecture & Ownership

• Take direct ownership of major parts of the technical stack, from initial architecture decisions through production operation

• Partner with the founders on build-vs-buy calls, technical roadmap, and where to invest engineering effort as the company scales

• Set technical standards and practices for the engineering function as Drafted makes its next few hires

Product Engineering

• Ship features across the full stack, from contributor-facing product surfaces to the internal tooling used by operations and quality teams

• Move from idea to production quickly; this is a company where engineering velocity is a competitive advantage, not a nice-to-have

Platform & Infrastructure

• Own the infrastructure behind quality scoring, task routing, and contributor matching, the systems that directly power Drafted's benchmark performance claims across ToolBench, HarmBench, OSWorld, PRM800K, and Global MMLU

• Build the reliability, monitoring, and scaling foundation needed to support a partner base that includes foundational model companies and a FAANG AGI lab

Team Building

• Help define the engineering hiring bar and interview process as Drafted makes its next engineering hires

• Mentor and ramp new engineers as the team grows beyond its founding size

What Success Looks Like

• First 30 days: deeply ramped on the codebase and the contributor/quality-scoring systems; shipped meaningful production changes

• First 90 days: own a major system end-to-end with the founders no longer in the implementation details, only the direction

• First 6 months: recognized as a technical decision-maker on the team, with the first engineering hires you helped bring on ramping under your guidance

What We're Looking For

Must-Haves

• A track record of owning and shipping production systems end-to-end, ideally including prior experience as an early or founding engineer at another startup

• Strong full-stack fundamentals (e.g. TypeScript/React, Python, Node.js) and the judgment to choose the right tool for a fast-moving, resource-constrained environment

• Comfort making real architecture decisions with incomplete information, and the humility to revisit them as the company learns

• Genuine excitement about being the first technical hire at an early-stage company: high ownership, high ambiguity, high visibility

Strong Nice-to-Haves

• Experience building systems involving matching, scoring, or ranking logic

• Experience with data-heavy or marketplace-style products at scale

• Direct exposure to how AI labs evaluate or consume training data, even without formal ML research experience

Compensation & Benefits

$160,000–$190,000 base, commensurate with experience, plus a founding-engineer equity grant (typically 0.4%–1.0% at this stage, calibrated to experience and timing of hire), vesting over four years with a one-year cliff. This is a below-market cash, above-market equity package consistent with how founding engineer roles are typically structured at the seed stage; candidates prioritizing near-term cash over long-term upside may be better suited to a later-stage role.

• Meaningful equity in an early-stage company with outsized upside

• Health, dental, and vision coverage

• Direct, regular access to the founding team; no layers between you and the decisions that matter

• A fast-moving environment where scope expands quickly for people who earn it

• Flexible working location, with a strong preference for candidates who can work closely with the founding team in person on a regular basis

Interview Process

• Intro call with the founders (30 min): background and mutual fit

• Technical deep dive (60–90 min): system design conversation grounded in a real, current Drafted infrastructure problem

• Build session: a paid, scoped pairing exercise or take-home reflecting actual work you'd do in the role

• Founder conversation: culture, ownership style, and long-term fit

• Offer

drafted is a proud equal opportunity employer. We are committed to fair hiring practices and to creating a welcoming environment for all team members. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, age, familial status or veteran status.