Founding Software Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

Founding Software Engineer

Type: Full-time | On-site | New York, NY
Compensation: $200K–$250K + 0.5–2% equity
Visa sponsorship: Not available

About the Company

We're a Y Combinator–backed, seed-stage startup building deployment infrastructure that powers mission-critical software in industries where reliability matters most — healthcare, finance, and manufacturing. Our platform lets AI and enterprise software ship securely inside customers' own cloud environments instead of centralized cloud, replacing fragile manual workflows with intelligent, automated orchestration. Our founding team comes from leading enterprise-software and developer-platform companies, with deep experience running customer deployments across hundreds of production environments.

We're a small, in-person founding team in New York City, shipping fast to a high bar.

Why Join

• Founding-engineer scope: Work side-by-side with the founders to shape our technical architecture, product roadmap, and engineering culture, building foundational systems from first principles.
• Hard technical problems with real-world impact: Design distributed systems that orchestrate software deployment across hundreds of production environments in critical industries.
• Ownership and velocity: Full end-to-end ownership of the systems you build, with the autonomy to ship fast.
• Strong comp and equity: $200K–$250K base plus meaningful early-stage equity.

The Role

As a Founding Software Engineer, you'll design and build distributed systems that transform how organizations deploy and manage software at scale, owning problems end-to-end and shipping code that runs in production across healthcare, finance, and manufacturing.

What You'll Be Doing

• Build at scale: Design, build, and maintain highly available systems that orchestrate software deployment across hundreds of production environments.
• Shape the foundation: Work directly with the founding team to define the company's technical direction and architecture.
• Solve and streamline: Identify inefficiencies and design elegant solutions, with the autonomy to ship fast.
• Own complex systems: Debug performance issues across distributed systems, from backend services to production infrastructure.
• Balance tradeoffs: Navigate engineering decisions thoughtfully, balancing short-term velocity with long-term scalability.

Tech stack: Kubernetes, Cloud (AWS/GCP). Nice-to-haves across Go, TypeScript, React, Postgres, S3, Helm, Docker, and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/Pulumi).

What We're Looking For

Must-haves

• 1+ years of experience as a fullstack, backend, or infra engineer who has built 0→1
• Experience building devtools or deployment infrastructure tooling
• Owned product development end-to-end (0 to 1)
• Proficiency across the stack
• Experience with Kubernetes and cloud technologies (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Undergraduate degree in Computer Science
• High iteration velocity suited to an early-stage startup

Nice-to-haves

• Experience at a high-growth, VC-backed startup
• Experience with Go (Golang)
• Experience deploying and scaling Kubernetes, Helm, and Docker
• Experience with TypeScript, React, Postgres, and S3
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform or Pulumi

Role Details

• Salary: $200K–$250K
• Equity: 0.5–2%
• On-site policy: 5 days in-office in New York City
• Visa sponsorship: Not available
• Employment type: Full-time
• Location: New York, NY

Life Here

• Fully in-person team in NYC
• Company-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Unlimited PTO and sick leave
• Annual professional development stipend
• Company-paid lunch, dinner, and coffee
• Annual retreats and team offsites