Being a founding engineer at an AI startup

The Pragmatic Engineer

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Being a founding engineer at an AI startup

Michelle Lim shares how to evaluate early-stage startup roles, negotiate equity, and grow into a high-impact founding engineer.

Gergely Orosz

Dec 03, 2025

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In this episode

Michelle Lim joined Warp as engineer number one and is now building her own startup, Flint. She brings a strong product-first mindset shaped by her time at Facebook, Slack, Robinhood, and Warp. Michelle shares why she chose Warp over safer offers, how she evaluates early-stage opportunities, and what she believes distinguishes great founding engineers.

Together, we cover how product-first engineers create value, why negotiating equity at early-stage startups requires a different approach, and why asking founders for references is a smart move. Michelle also shares lessons from building consumer and infrastructure products, how she thinks about tech stack choices, and how engineers can increase their impact by taking on work outside their job descriptions.

If you want to understand what founders look for in early engineers or how to grow into a founding-engineer role, this episode is full of practical advice backed by real examples.

An interesting quote from the episode

Michelle’s advice to be a standout founding engineer at an AI company:

Gergely: What would your advice be to software engineers who would love to join as a founding engineer, perhaps an AI startup these days?
Michelle: It’s about showing that you’ve built in AI before, because that skill is very much in high demand and it’s very new. Very few people — relatively speaking — have ever built an AI product before. So just spending some time over the weekends knowing how to build an AI product already helps you stand out above many people. Build anything that scratches your itch that uses any of the models, or the completion APIs.
To excel in the role: it starts off with picking the right founder.
Once you do join, it’s all about volunteering to do the things that no one wants to do, but it’s the most important thing for the business. So I wrote blog posts, published them on Hacker News, and I answered all the questions on Hacker News. I went out there and I created our company Twitter, and I was writing tweets for the company. I then started a YouTube channel for the company before any developer tool companies really thought about doing YouTube. I started a Discord channel, filed all feedback, and did things outside of engineering that the business really needed.
You still have to make sure that you’re doing your number one job, which is software engineering. That needs to still stay the main focus, and you should only volunteer for other stuff if you are already doing well in your main job.
The benefit of doing a lot of these things and learning how to do a lot of these things is that then you get to learn what businesses need.