Founding Software Engineer - AI Infrastructure

Location: Bengaluru, India
Type: Full-time, in-person
Copperhead is building an AI engineering platform for electronics. Think Cursor for circuit boards. Our agents help engineers create, modify and verify real PCB designs using frontier models, deterministic engineering tools and open-source EDA infrastructure.
Copperhead is open source, has crossed 1,400 installs and is already used by more than 300 engineers. We are now looking for a Founding Software Engineer to help build the infrastructure behind reliable AI-driven hardware engineering.
This is a hands-on engineering role for someone who enjoys building AI systems, backend infrastructure and developer tools from the ground up.
Explore Copperhead at https://copperhead.sh
What you'll work on:
• Build the agent infrastructure used to create, modify and verify PCB designs
• Develop reliable tool-use, context management, memory, evaluation and orchestration systems
• Build stateful execution loops that can plan work, call engineering tools, inspect results and recover from failures
• Create sandboxed environments for safely operating on real KiCad projects and user files
• Improve schematic generation, PCB layout, component selection and datasheet understanding
• Integrate LLMs with KiCad, deterministic verification tools and open-source EDA infrastructure
• Build job queues, workers, APIs and artifact pipelines for long-running engineering workflows
• Develop evaluation harnesses and benchmarks for measuring engineering correctness, reliability and regressions
• Design production-quality backend systems and developer-facing interfaces
• Improve system reliability, latency, performance, observability and test coverage
• Build logging and tracing systems that make agent behaviour inspectable and reproducible
• Own projects from initial exploration and prototyping through production deployment
• Contribute to technical documentation and open-source engineering practices
• Help establish Copperhead’s engineering culture, architecture and development processes
What we're looking for:
• Strong software engineering skills in Python, TypeScript, Go, Rust or similar languages
• Experience designing, building and operating production backend or infrastructure systems
• Experience building AI products, intelligent agents, model integrations or workflow orchestration systems
• Understanding of LLM tool calling, structured outputs, context management and multi-step execution
• Experience with APIs, databases, background workers, message queues or distributed job-processing systems
• Familiarity with failure handling concepts such as retries, idempotency, timeouts, checkpointing and resumable execution
• Experience using containers and cloud infrastructure to run isolated or compute-intensive workloads
• Ability to write clean, tested and maintainable production code
• Strong understanding of system design, performance, security, monitoring and observability
• Experience debugging failures across application code, infrastructure and external services
• Comfort working through ambiguous technical problems and owning outcomes end to end
• Ability to move between fast prototypes and reliable production systems
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Interest in electronics, hardware design or PCB engineering, with the ability to learn unfamiliar technical domains quickly
We care more about the systems you have built and the problems you have solved than your exact number of years of experience. Previous PCB design experience is useful but not required.
The kind of experience that stands out:
You may have built or worked on:
• AI agents that call tools and operate on files, codebases or external environments
• Coding agents, developer tools, CI systems or remote execution platforms
• Distributed workers that execute long-running, asynchronous jobs
• Sandboxed code or workflow execution environments
• Evaluation systems for measuring the reliability of probabilistic AI behaviour
• Model-routing, fallback, caching or provider abstraction layers
• Production systems using PostgreSQL, Redis, queues, object storage and containerized workers
• CLIs, language tooling, compilers, static-analysis tools or intermediate representations
• Infrastructure where auditability, reproducibility and failure recovery were important
You should be able to explain what you personally owned, the tradeoffs you made and how the system behaved when something failed.
Nice to have:
• Experience building developer tools or open-source software
• Familiarity with KiCad or other EDA and CAD tools
• Experience with LLM evaluation, structured generation or agent reliability
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform or cloud infrastructure
• Knowledge of compilers, static analysis, intermediate representations or program transformation
• Experience building multi-tenant execution infrastructure
• Contributions to technically ambitious open-source projects
• Prior experience at an early-stage startup
A degree in computer science, engineering or a related field is welcome, but equivalent practical experience matters just as much.
Why join Copperhead:
• Join at the founding stage and shape the product, architecture and company
• Work on challenging problems across AI, infrastructure, developer tools and electronics
• Take meaningful ownership from your first day
• Build foundational systems instead of another thin wrapper around a model API
• Build openly alongside an emerging developer and hardware community
• Help define how engineers design hardware with AI
• Receive a competitive salary and meaningful equity
Apply here: https://copperhead.sh/careers

Work arrangement
No