Senior Software Engineer (Founding-Level)

Bustem helps e-commerce brands identify and take down copycats, counterfeiters, scammers, and unauthorized sellers stealing their revenue. We scan marketplaces, websites, ads, and domains to detect brand abuse and enforce against it. Bustem is bootstrapped, profitable, and growing fast: we hit $1M ARR within 60 days of launch and have since scaled to $5M+ ARR with zero outside investors. We’ve enforced takedowns on 100,000+ infringing listings, reclaimed over $1M in lost revenue, and now protect over 120+ brands.

About the Role

We're hiring a Senior Software Engineer at the founding level, someone who has already built and owned something from scratch, not someone looking for their first 0-to-1 experience. You'll work at the core of Bustem's product: the real-time detection and enforcement systems that protect 120+ brands from counterfeiters and unauthorized sellers. This is a peer-level technical hire, not a junior seat executing someone else's spec. You'll work closely with our CTO and have real autonomy to make architecture and build-vs-buy calls independently, and to raise the technical bar for the rest of the team.

Who You Are

• 5-10+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Meaningful time at an early-stage or bootstrapped startup, ideally as a founding or near-founding engineer
• Have owned a system end-to-end at real scale
• 1+ years operating with minimal senior oversight
• Comfortable making build-vs-buy and architecture tradeoffs independently
• Real production-incident ownership, not just being on a team that had incidents
• Track record of shipping to real, paying customers
• Proficient with Next.js, Postgres, and TypeScript
• Comfortable integrating AI/LLMs into engineering workflows

What You'll Do

• Bring senior judgment to architecture, code quality, and engineering process
• Mentor other engineers on the team
• Construct AI-powered scraping and detection systems across marketplaces, social platforms, and the open web
• Build agents and workflows that automate takedown reporting at scale
• Design and own scalable backend systems and APIs using Next.js, Postgres, and TypeScript
• Take real production-incident ownership
• Leverage LLMs to cut manual engineering work

What Great Looks Like

• You've built something here from scratch that didn't exist before
• Other engineers are better because you're on the team
• You make sound architecture calls independently
• You treat production incidents as your problem to solve
• Bustem's detection and enforcement systems get faster, more reliable, and harder to game because you're behind them

Location

• On-Site, New York, NY
• Equity: 0.25-0.5%
• Daily Lunch and Dinner Stipend
• Bi-weekly team events
• Direct, close working relationship with the founder and CTO