# Gooseworks (YC W23) Is Hiring a Founding Builder / Engineer > Source: > Published: 2026-08-16 12:00:23+00:00 Self-Improving Ad Creative Engines *Note: This role is for someone who can combine engineering excellence with strong product thinking and taste. That’s why I’ve called it Founding Builder. The role is best for those who actually enjoy building products, not just building engineering systems.* **Distribution is the hardest problem every company has.** Not building the product — getting it in front of people, over and over, in a way that works. Today that means an army of humans making creative, testing it, reading the numbers, and doing it again next week. It doesn't scale, and it's the single biggest tax on every consumer brand in the world. We think that changes. The billion-dollar companies of the next decade won't scale linearly with headcount — they'll be run by fleets of AI agents, and the org chart will look more like an architecture diagram than a hierarchy. Gooseworks builds self-improving AI agents that run growth for consumer brands — ads, UGC, organic — end to end. Very early - this is just a few months old, but seeing very strong pull: We're a YC company based in San Francisco, and **we run the company on agent harnesses ourselves** — not as a demo, as the actual way the work gets done. We’re a small team that previously built Athina AI, an LLM observability & evaluation platform that was used by companies like Perplexity, You, Doximity, Meesho, and several other public companies. **Now we’re building Gooseworks to solve a much more exciting problem.** **Goose** is new, just a few months old. In the last few months itself, we’ve: A huge part of this was done by Goose, our AI coworker. Now we’re scaling this for our customers. You'd be a core part of the founding team. That means **owning product and engineering decisions**, shipping new products and features, talking to users, and deciding what to do next. The market is constantly evolving and so are we. You should be comfortable trying lots of things with uncertain outcomes and failing fast. Exceptional candidates will be considered for founding-level scope and equity. Plus everything else a founding engineer touches: the app itself, the pipelines behind it, the internal harnesses that make four people move like twenty. **Nice to have but not required:** TypeScript/Next.js fluency, motion or video skills, and having been early at a startup before. TypeScript everywhere. Express + Prisma + Postgres on the backend, Next.js / React + Tailwind on the frontend, Claude Agent SDK, [Trigger.dev](http://Trigger.dev) for the agent layer. **San Francisco, in person strongly preferred.** **Only exceptional candidates will be considered for remote positions.** If you've shipped something with real taste recently – send us the link. **If it makes sense, we will move very fast from intro call to offer within days.** Goose is an AI creative engine that turns your brand into a continuous stream of on-brand video ads. We index your existing materials — videos, product shots, testimonials, ad performance data — into a context layer, then generate short-form creative for Meta and TikTok at the volume performance marketing actually requires. The engine compounds: the agent learns from ad performance, competitors, trends, and human feedback, so your creative gets better every month.