Founding Engineer Jobs in USA with Visa Sponsorship
Founding Engineer roles are among the most sponsorship-friendly positions in early-stage tech. Startups filing H-1B visa, O-1 visa, or EB-1 petitions for these hires treat sponsorship as a competitive advantage, not a burden, because the talent pool is global and the role demands it. For detailed occupation requirements, see the O*NET profile.
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Get Access To All JobsAbout Dealops
We’re building the revenue infrastructure the next decade of B2B AI companies run on by starting with the most critical part in the revenue journey, deal pricing. Today, sales reps spend hours building their own pricing spreadsheets for each deal, only to discount too much and spend another cycle iterating with Finance. This is a massive problem for B2B companies, as we’ve seen up to 30% unnecessary overdiscounting with customers. Our founder saw this firsthand when she worked in finance and pricing at Stripe, where she has priced over a thousand deals with the sales org. This problem exists because pricing is a black box. Sales teams aren’t trained to make pricing decisions and aren’t incentivized to optimize for long-term revenue. As pricing models become more complex due to AI and the shift toward usage-based, outcome-based, and hybrid models, this challenge is only compounding. There’s a massive opportunity to build the revenue infrastructure for next-generation companies. We’re positioned to lead this market shift as teams are finding out previous solutions are breaking down. That’s why the fastest growing enterprises and AI startups like Airwallex, Plaid, Harvey, LangChain, and Clay are partnering with us to build the foundations of their revenue infrastructure. Backed by $7M from General Catalyst, Pear VC, and executives from OpenAI, Stripe, Slack, and more, we’re now focused on growing revenue 10x and shaping the future of deal pricing.
The Role
We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our growing engineering team and help build the next-gen AI-powered platform for revenue optimization. You'll work across the full stack -- from our core deal pricing product to the tools that help customers optimize their revenue strategies with data-driven insights. We're a small team, so you'll have plenty of room to fully own high-impact products from day one.
First 3 months
- Develop key features for deal pricing and packaging recommendations, blending machine learning with a rule-based engine to optimize pricing.
- Design and run A/B pricing experiments that directly move customer revenue — past experiments have yielded a 10–20% boost. (Dealops is the first to let companies A/B test rep behavior at scale.)
- Collect and integrate customer feedback to drive iterative improvement and product-market fit.
By 6 months
- Build agents that process unstructured, natural-language data to further sharpen our pricing and packaging recommendations.
- Spearhead infrastructure and tooling for admin users, enabling infinite customization through natural language and LLMs which cuts customer onboarding time by 10x.
- Contribute to the future product roadmap and our long-term vision of becoming an end-to-end sales optimization platform.
By 9 months
- Own an entire product or product feature suite, from design through implementation and keep innovating. Like everyone on the team, you'll also pitch in on customer onboarding and support, and plan and lead projects end-to-end.
What Excites Us
- 4+ years of software development experience, with a strong full-stack focus (senior preferred; strong mid-level welcome).
- Proficiency in React, TypeScript, and SQL (PostgreSQL or similar).
- A track record of building and launching scalable, reliable products in close collaboration with designers and other cross-functional partners.
- Experience with complex products that have high reliability and accuracy requirements, ideally in a fast-moving environment.
- Bonus: experience with Tailwind, Express, machine learning, prompt engineering / AI tooling, or previously leading a tech team.
What Excites You
- Tackle complex, high-impact challenges. Turning pricing from an art into a science is a technically hard, high-stakes problem with enormous room for innovation. AI is at the core of our vision — this year we're building agents that automatically generate quotes for reps and assist managers with approval flows, and that's just the beginning.
- High ownership and influence. As an early engineer, you'll own large pieces of the product and infrastructure from day one. Your work will shape both our tech stack and our broader product vision, and you'll make genuinely strategic decisions about how pricing software evolves.
- Fast-paced career growth and leadership. Startups mean accelerated growth. Whether you want to step into a tech lead role, drive product innovation, or architect major systems, you'll be positioned to take on leadership as we scale.
- Shape company culture. As an early hire, you won't just build the product — you'll help define how we work and what we value. This is a chance to create something special, technically and culturally.
What we offer
- Competitive compensation: $140k–$180k base salary
- Generous early-stage equity package
- Unlimited PTO
- Free meals - lunch and dinner on us.
- Free ubers for late nights worked in the office
- Full health coverage
- Flexible remote time
- 401K
- Significant ownership and autonomy
- The chance to work on cutting-edge AI applications in enterprise software
Compensation Range: $140K - $180K
About Dealops
We’re building the revenue infrastructure the next decade of B2B AI companies run on by starting with the most critical part in the revenue journey, deal pricing. Today, sales reps spend hours building their own pricing spreadsheets for each deal, only to discount too much and spend another cycle iterating with Finance. This is a massive problem for B2B companies, as we’ve seen up to 30% unnecessary overdiscounting with customers. Our founder saw this firsthand when she worked in finance and pricing at Stripe, where she has priced over a thousand deals with the sales org. This problem exists because pricing is a black box. Sales teams aren’t trained to make pricing decisions and aren’t incentivized to optimize for long-term revenue. As pricing models become more complex due to AI and the shift toward usage-based, outcome-based, and hybrid models, this challenge is only compounding. There’s a massive opportunity to build the revenue infrastructure for next-generation companies. We’re positioned to lead this market shift as teams are finding out previous solutions are breaking down. That’s why the fastest growing enterprises and AI startups like Airwallex, Plaid, Harvey, LangChain, and Clay are partnering with us to build the foundations of their revenue infrastructure. Backed by $7M from General Catalyst, Pear VC, and executives from OpenAI, Stripe, Slack, and more, we’re now focused on growing revenue 10x and shaping the future of deal pricing.
The Role
We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our growing engineering team and help build the next-gen AI-powered platform for revenue optimization. You'll work across the full stack -- from our core deal pricing product to the tools that help customers optimize their revenue strategies with data-driven insights. We're a small team, so you'll have plenty of room to fully own high-impact products from day one.
First 3 months
- Develop key features for deal pricing and packaging recommendations, blending machine learning with a rule-based engine to optimize pricing.
- Design and run A/B pricing experiments that directly move customer revenue — past experiments have yielded a 10–20% boost. (Dealops is the first to let companies A/B test rep behavior at scale.)
- Collect and integrate customer feedback to drive iterative improvement and product-market fit.
By 6 months
- Build agents that process unstructured, natural-language data to further sharpen our pricing and packaging recommendations.
- Spearhead infrastructure and tooling for admin users, enabling infinite customization through natural language and LLMs which cuts customer onboarding time by 10x.
- Contribute to the future product roadmap and our long-term vision of becoming an end-to-end sales optimization platform.
By 9 months
- Own an entire product or product feature suite, from design through implementation and keep innovating. Like everyone on the team, you'll also pitch in on customer onboarding and support, and plan and lead projects end-to-end.
What Excites Us
- 4+ years of software development experience, with a strong full-stack focus (senior preferred; strong mid-level welcome).
- Proficiency in React, TypeScript, and SQL (PostgreSQL or similar).
- A track record of building and launching scalable, reliable products in close collaboration with designers and other cross-functional partners.
- Experience with complex products that have high reliability and accuracy requirements, ideally in a fast-moving environment.
- Bonus: experience with Tailwind, Express, machine learning, prompt engineering / AI tooling, or previously leading a tech team.
What Excites You
- Tackle complex, high-impact challenges. Turning pricing from an art into a science is a technically hard, high-stakes problem with enormous room for innovation. AI is at the core of our vision — this year we're building agents that automatically generate quotes for reps and assist managers with approval flows, and that's just the beginning.
- High ownership and influence. As an early engineer, you'll own large pieces of the product and infrastructure from day one. Your work will shape both our tech stack and our broader product vision, and you'll make genuinely strategic decisions about how pricing software evolves.
- Fast-paced career growth and leadership. Startups mean accelerated growth. Whether you want to step into a tech lead role, drive product innovation, or architect major systems, you'll be positioned to take on leadership as we scale.
- Shape company culture. As an early hire, you won't just build the product — you'll help define how we work and what we value. This is a chance to create something special, technically and culturally.
What we offer
- Competitive compensation: $140k–$180k base salary
- Generous early-stage equity package
- Unlimited PTO
- Free meals - lunch and dinner on us.
- Free ubers for late nights worked in the office
- Full health coverage
- Flexible remote time
- 401K
- Significant ownership and autonomy
- The chance to work on cutting-edge AI applications in enterprise software
Compensation Range: $140K - $180K
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Get Access To All JobsTips for Finding Visa Sponsorship as a Founding Engineer
Target seed to Series B companies
Early-stage startups sponsoring a Founding Engineer typically move faster through internal approval than enterprises. Companies at seed to Series B stages are actively competing for scarce talent and less likely to reject a strong candidate over visa paperwork.
Lead with technical ownership, not just skills
Sponsorship decisions for founding engineers hinge on demonstrated ownership: systems you've built from scratch, architectural decisions you've led. Interviewers need to justify a specialty occupation petition, and a generalist skills list won't support that case.
Understand what makes this a specialty occupation
USCIS requires a direct link between your degree field and the role. For Founding Engineer positions, a computer science, software engineering, or closely related degree creates the clearest path. Document how your academic background connects directly to the technical scope.
O-1A is a realistic path for engineers with standout credentials
If you've published research, contributed to widely used open-source projects, or received industry awards, the O-1A visa is worth exploring. It bypasses the H-1B lottery entirely and is increasingly common among high-profile founding engineering hires at venture-backed startups.
Get clarity on equity and sponsorship continuity early
Startup equity is a core part of founding engineer compensation, but it creates a sponsorship complexity: if the company is acquired or shuts down, your visa status is tied to that employer. Clarify the company's runway and succession plan before accepting an offer.
Use Migrate Mate to find startups actively sponsoring
Most founding engineer roles with active sponsorship don't advertise it prominently. Migrate Mate filters specifically for visa-sponsoring employers, so you're not spending hours applying to companies that will decline at the offer stage because of your status.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can a startup sponsor a Founding Engineer for an H-1B visa?
Yes. Startups can file H-1B visa petitions regardless of company size, including pre-revenue companies, as long as there's an employer-employee relationship and the role qualifies as a specialty occupation. USCIS scrutinizes small employers more heavily, so documentation of the job's degree requirement and the company's ability to pay the prevailing wage is critical. Having an attorney prepare the petition significantly improves outcomes.
What degree does a Founding Engineer need for H-1B sponsorship?
USCIS requires a bachelor's degree or higher in a directly related field, typically computer science, software engineering, electrical engineering, or a closely adjacent discipline. A general business or unrelated degree creates risk. If your degree doesn't match the role precisely, three years of highly specialized work experience can substitute for each year of missing education, though this requires strong documentation.
How does the H-1B lottery affect Founding Engineer hiring at startups?
It's a real constraint. Only about 85,000 H-1B visas are issued annually against far more registrations, so selection isn't guaranteed in any given year. Startups sponsoring Founding Engineers often explore parallel pathways, O-1A for candidates with exceptional credentials, or EB-1C if there's a management track. Some companies time hiring to align with the April lottery window and plan onboarding around October 1 start dates.
Is the O-1A visa a realistic option for a Founding Engineer role?
For candidates with notable credentials, yes. The O-1A requires evidence of extraordinary ability across criteria like original contributions, published work, high salary relative to peers, critical roles at distinguished organizations, or press coverage. Founding engineers at well-known startups, open-source contributors with significant adoption, or engineers with conference presentations often qualify. The O-1A has no lottery and no annual cap, which makes it attractive for both candidates and employers who need certainty.
Where can I find Founding Engineer jobs that include visa sponsorship?
Migrate Mate is built specifically for this, every role on the platform is filtered for active visa sponsorship, so you're not wading through listings that will fall apart at the offer stage. Founding Engineer roles at sponsoring startups are listed directly, with employer details and role requirements visible upfront. It's the most direct way to connect your job search with companies that have already committed to sponsoring international candidates.
What is the prevailing wage requirement for sponsored Founding Engineer jobs?
U.S. employers sponsoring a visa must pay at least the prevailing wage, which is what workers in the same role, area, and experience level typically earn. The Department of Labor sets this rate to make sure companies aren't hiring foreign workers simply because they'd accept lower pay than a U.S. worker. It varies by job title, location, and experience. You can look up current prevailing wage rates for any occupation and location using the OFLC Wage Search page.