What is Cartage?

Cartage is building Wilson, an AI that coordinates freight for manufacturers and distributors—handling the tedious work of booking, tracking, and managing shipments end-to-end. Our customers range from lumber mills to furniture manufacturers.

With Wilson, teams can offload their entire logistics function and scale infinitely at a fraction of the cost of a human team.

Backed by Y Combinator (S24) and a $3.3M seed round, we’ve hit an inflection point in revenue growth and are scaling the team to meet accelerating demand.

This isn’t just a founding engineer role—it’s a call for former CTOs who want to get back in the trenches and build again. You’ve scaled teams and systems. Now you want to do it differently: smaller, faster, and closer to the metal.

You’ll work side-by-side with the founders and take ownership of critical infrastructure, architecture, and AI design decisions from day one. If you miss the speed and intensity of building from scratch—and want a real shot at building something enduring—we’d love to talk.

Our Culture

Cartage is a startup for builders who want full ownership. No PMs. No middle managers. Engineers own the customer experience end-to-end—from “what should we build?” to “it’s live and customers love it.”

Our Core Values:

Taste: Companies win on taste. Engineering is a creative discipline—part logic, part art—and we care deeply about how things feel, how they’re named, and how they scale. We sweat the small stuff because it compounds.

Extreme Ownership: Everyone runs their domain like a founder. You own problems end-to-end. No handoffs, no waiting—just clear goals and the autonomy to build.

Radical Transparency: You’ll see everything—from product decisions to monthly investor updates. We move faster when everyone has full context.

We’re an in-person team in San Francisco, CA, and believe deeply in building together in real life.

What You’ll Do

Scale our architecture: Design and optimize systems that can handle spikes of 10× current traffic—ensuring real-time performance and reliability as our customer base grows.

Automate AI evaluation loops: Own the tooling to monitor, evaluate, and retrain AI models in production—ensuring performance improves automatically as new edge cases arise.

Own the product: You won’t get a Linear ticket—you’ll get a problem and talk to the customer directly. You’ll design the solution, write the code, and ship it.

Build deep integrations: Develop rich, bidirectional experiences with Slack and Microsoft Teams—think slash commands, exception alerts, and real-time shipment dashboards that live where our customers already work.

Who You Are

Former CTO, still a builder: You’ve led teams and owned architecture, but your heart is still in the code. You want to build products, not manage spreadsheets. You're excited to join a small team and go deep on hard problems again.

High-agency problem solver: You don’t wait for direction. You move fast through ambiguity, seek clarity on your own, and hop on the phone with customers to get to the root of issues and solve them directly.

Full-stack executor: You get handed a problem like “get this customer live,” and do whatever it takes—build the UI, extend the API, fine-tune the agent—to make it happen.

What We Offer

• Meaningful equity – ~1%+ ownership as an early team member
• Competitive salary – $110K–$180K depending on experience
• Full health/dental/vision – 100% covered
• High trust, high ownership environment – Zero micromanagement
• A real shot at something big – Help define the future of AI in logistics