Founding Senior Principal Engineer - AI, Agents & Infrastructure

Founding Senior Principal Engineer — AI, Agents & Infrastructure (Nivalto • Stealth)

Location: Remote First (San Francisco Bay Area candidates only)

Compensation: Equity-first (Pre-Seed) → Post-Seed Salary $285K–$320K + 20–25% Performance Bonus

Equity Range: 1.5%–2.25% total at full-time conversion (4-year vest, 1-year cliff; milestone top-ups)

Reports To: CEO / Founder

Stage: Pre-Seed → Seed Fundraising Q1 2026

Seniority: Founding-Level (Clear path to Head of Engineering)

Time Commitment: Fractional (10–12 hrs/week, pre-seed) → Post-Seed full-time

About Nivalto

Nivalto is developing the critical infrastructure for the UHNW Family Offices (payment, securities trading, and other domain agent workflows) powering the emerging AI agent economy—a $400B+ market opportunity by 2030. We're solving the hardest challenges enterprises face when deploying AI agents at scale in regulated environments, including how those agents are allowed to move money.

Our platform unifies security, governance, compliance, and enterprise AI payments through architecture:

• Open Protocol: Industry-standard protocols for AI agent infrastructure (positioned for standardization)
• Cloud Platform: SaaS control plane for enterprise deployment and management
• Trusted Runtime & Edge Architecture: Secure, high-performance execution environments for governed agent workflows
• AI Payments Fabric: Policy-aware, programmable transaction layer that governs how AI-driven workflows initiate, route, and reconcile payments across existing rails and providers
• Legacy Core (AURA Fabric): Enterprise integration layer for mission-critical systems

Why this role is unique

Category-defining engineering

You’re not optimizing an existing app—you’re engineering the foundation for governed, cross-organization agent workflows and policy-aware payments in regulated environments.

You will be the 0→1 technical owner for major parts of Agent ROA Protocol—our open, standards-bound protocol for governed AI agent workflows—as a senior IC who leads through architecture, code, and technical decision-making.

This is a hands-on role: you’ll write production code, set engineering standards that stick, and build systems that survive audits, incident response, vendor churn, legal discovery, and regulatory scrutiny.

Role overview

You are the founding 0→1 principal engineer responsible for turning Nivalto’s protocol-first vision into an implementation-ready, enterprise-deployable governance and transaction control platform for regulated environments. This is not a demo-building role—you will build the hardened technical core that stands up to audits, breaches, vendor changes, legal discovery, and regulatory scrutiny.

You’ll own architecture, security posture, engineering execution for core services, and early buyer-ready deliverables (reference implementations, verifiers, integration guidance), partnering closely with the CEO & VP of Product on sequencing, scope control, and buyer readiness.

What you’ll build (core systems)

• Governed execution + evidence layer: fail-closed edge/border enforcement patterns; validator services; canonicalization; signing/verification; receipt generation and pipelines; constrained delegation and capability-scoped authorization; evidence formats, test vectors, verifier utilities, and packaging.
• Governed money movement layer: policy-checked orchestration across payment rails/providers; spend authorization; step-up approvals; hard stops; audit trails; integrations for treasury/AP/AR and agent-initiated transactions.
• Policy control plane: policy authoring, versioning, approvals, rollout controls; policy evaluation integration enforcing; control mappings appropriate for regulated buyers.
• Platform foundations: key management (HSM/KMS), key rotation, incident response; immutable retention and storage tiering; observability and audit exports; multi-tenant vs single-tenant deployment strategy.
• Builder/SDK layer: safe integration points, developer-friendly SDKs/templates/adapters, policy-driven routing across multiple model providers, cost controls, and secure-by-default scaffolding.

Responsibilities

• Architecture & execution: translate specs into real services/APIs; make ruthless scope tradeoffs while preserving core guarantees.
• Security, evidence, audit posture: threat model, key strategy, verifier approach, incident playbooks; ensure outputs are tamper-evident, exportable, and independently verifiable.
• Principal-level technical leadership: set engineering standards (CI/CD, testing posture, release discipline, security baseline); own key technical choices; mentor and raise the bar for future hires and vendors through review and design leadership (without being a people manager).
• Customer/partner readiness: support technical diligence, publish realistic integration guidance, and align roadmap to buyer pain—not novelty.

Required qualifications

Principal IC leadership + 0→1 execution

• 10+ years building and leading software systems as a senior IC (Principal/Staff+); prior early-stage / founding environment experience strongly preferred.
• Proven ability to impose engineering discipline on fast-moving builds (especially with vendors), and to ship hardened systems—not prototypes.

Educational Background

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or related field (preferred)
• BS in relevant engineering discipline (minimum)

Technical depth (must-have)

• Strong backend/platform skills (APIs, distributed systems basics, reliability patterns).
• Security-minded implementation skills: signing/verifying, key management concepts, audit trails, tamper-evident logging.
• Proven 0→1 to 1→N product execution: from whiteboard → PRD → shipped platform used by enterprises.
• Depth in governance, identity/authorization, or policy systems (e.g., PKI/mTLS, OAuth2/OIDC, Zero Trust; policy-as-code such as OPA/Rego or equivalent).
• Fluency with cloud & distributed systems (multi-tenant control planes, Kubernetes-era delivery, observability, SLOs).
• Strong standards or ecosystem chops (writing specs, running interop, aligning vendors/customers).
• Exceptional writing & communication—clear specifications, design docs, and external-facing briefs.

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Operator empathy

• Ability to design systems that auditors, admins, and compliance teams can actually use (not just “logs in JSON”).

Highly valued experience

• Gateways/proxies, policy engines, authorization systems, compliance logging, evidence pipelines.
• Payments orchestration or high-integrity transaction systems (state machines, idempotency, reconciliation).
• Regulated domains (banking, healthcare, insurance, trading, supply chain).
• Experience building admin tooling and operational consoles.
• MLOps experience for edge deployments (model rollout, monitoring, governance, rollback).
• Products touching routing, service mesh, SDN, or network security, or AI orchestration in regulated settings.
• Participation in IETF/CNCF/W3C/OpenTelemetry/SPIFFE/SPIRE or similar bodies.
• Built conformance programs, certification/badging, or marketplace-style verification.

Preferred backgrounds

• Security + platform engineering leader (identity, authZ, gateways)
• Payments infrastructure engineering leader (orchestration, treasury, risk controls)
• “Fixer” principal engineer who stabilized vendor-built systems and scaled them
• Potential prior employers (not required): Stripe, Adyen, Modern Treasury, Cloudflare, Okta, AWS, GCP, Microsoft, Plaid, Rippling, Snowflake, Palantir, Databricks (or similar “systems + compliance + scale” environments)

Engagement model and conversion

• Pre-seed: Fractional (10–12 hrs/week), equity-first; acts as technical owner for key core systems with decision authority in their domains. Seed capital expected in Q1 2026.
• Post-seed: Converts to full-time with salary/bonus and title remains Founding Principal Engineer (with clear growth path to Head of Engineering).

Apply

Send your LinkedIn/CV and a cover letter addressing the following to careers@nivalto.com with subject: "Founding Senior Principal Engineer"

Work authorization: Open to US and international; relocation/visa considered for exceptional candidates.

EEO & Confidentiality: We’re an equal opportunity employer. Some technical details are shared only post-NDA due to stealth.