Overview

Founded: 2025
Website: https://tightrope.dev
Location: San Francisco, CA (Hybrid - 4 days a week in-office Mon-Thurs)
Funding: $7M total from Amplify Partners (first check in Modal, Langchain, Hightouch)
Tech Stack: Python + React

Mission & Vision

Integrations are one of the biggest, unsolved challenges of widespread AI adoption. If an agent can't connect to the systems humans use every day, it's just a demo. AI is only as good as the context it has.

For decades, integrating software meant waiting for websites to build open APIs. Most never built them - they didn’t need to, wanted to keep things closed, or never evolved fast enough. But every one of those websites has a UI.

We believe the browser is the universal integration layer. Any system a human can access, an agent should be able to access too. No more manually logging in, filling out forms, or pulling reports.

For engineers, this enables a full 360° connective layer to every tool your users work with. Not just the vendors with clean APIs. All of them. Data and actions that were previously trapped behind portals and performed manually, now are now programmable.

Making this possible means solving for the complexity that shows up in the real world: every auth method, type of workflow, errors, and UI changes across millions of systems. That’s what we’re building at Tightrope – AI-powered infrastructure to make browser automation safe, reliable, and shippable.

Leadership & Team

Tightrope is led by a founding team with over a decade of combined experience building B2B integration & authentication infrastructure.

• Tara Pichumani — Co-Founder & CEO
  Former Head of Platform at Merge. Launched 7 unified API products and 250+ partner integrations that grew from 0 → $13M ARR in two years.

• Alex Zaldastani — Co-Founder & CTO
  Founding engineer and engineering leader at Stytch. Built core auth APIs that scaled to millions of users. Prior roles at Coinbase.

• Jumar Martin — Founding Engineer
  Early engineer at Aleph. Built the mapping infrastructure for autonomous vehicles at Cruise.

We value great communicators, people who love their craft, strong owners. Care deeply, challenge directly. Do your best work, the way you work best.

Everyone engages directly with customers and ships daily. You’ll be actively shaping the product, the team, and the company.

Core Technical Challenges

Browser automation is deceptively hard.

AI has opened up new possibilities and reduced the engineering burden, but there are still incredibly challenging problems to make it viable in an enterprise integration context.

• Auth is the first wall.

Credential storage, session management, 2FA flows, SSO redirects. Every portal handles it differently. We build the infrastructure to manage end-user credentials securely and handle any auth reliably — including building our own managed SIM farm for TOTP codes!

• Changing UIs break things constantly.

A class name changes. A button moves. A new modal appears. Traditional browser automation fails silently or crashes. We're building self-healing infrastructure — detecting UI changes, flagging drift, suggesting updates before things break.

• AI can be dangerous at run-time

LLMs can navigate a browser, but it’s risky to ship that to production. You need to know exactly what it's going to do. Tightrope uses AI to build the automation, but execution is deterministic — structured as blocks and steps, using selectors or coordinates depending on what's reliable. Transparent, predictable, editable.

Through our Builder (AI-powered generation), Playbooks (the automation primitive), Runner (self-healing execution engine), every day at Tightrope is a step forward towards solving these problems.

Who We Build For

Companies built today have a once in a generation opportunity to build AI that automates manual work in almost every industry.

The biggest opportunities are where data access is hardest — regulated environments, legacy systems, workflows that are locked behind logins.

Today, the verticals we see demand from are:

• Healthcare & Insurance — carrier portals, clearinghouses, EHRs, prior auth

• Logistics & Supply Chain — customs systems, carrier portals, retail supplier invoicing

• Financial Services — payroll, accounting tools, cap tables, compliance reporting

• Biotech & Research — genome browsers, legacy research databases

The verticals we can serve are endless —but they're all rooted in the same problem: secure, bidirectional data access via the browser, the universal integration layer.

We knew that Tightrope needed to be built for complex & sensitive data environments from the start. Human-in-the-loop controls for sensitive automations. Full observability and audit trails for compliance. SOC 2 Type 2 certified, with HIPAA and GDPR support built in.

Developers building context-aware AI agents all need the same thing: secure access to customer UIs to unlock data previously out of reach, with reliable execution & the ability to ship with confidence. That's what we provide.

Join the Founding Engineering Team

You'll be one of the first engineers on the team—high ownership, high impact.

Browser automation is inherently fragile. Portals have weird auth, UIs change constantly, and nothing works the same way twice. You'll build the infrastructure that makes it reliable.

Here's what a day could look like:

• Whiteboarding product and system designs

• Turning ambiguous customer problems into concrete solutions

• Shipping fast, talking to customers, helping build the team

Who You Are

You're curious about what it's like to build a company from scratch—how decisions get made, how to invest in foundations while still moving fast. You want exposure to product, infrastructure, customer calls, and hiring all at once.

You're a strong backend or full-stack engineer. You've built and scaled production systems. You might have experience with API design or distributed systems. Most importantly, you're comfortable learning fast and building in ambiguity.

We work in-person 4 days/week in SF, with competitive comp & equity to match.