Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer

Location: New York City (Chelsea) — on-site

Type: Full-time Stage: Early-stage, well-funded startup

Compensation: Up to $260K base, depending on experience, plus 1–2% equity

About the Company

We're an early-stage startup, backed by leading crypto and fintech investors, building next-generation markets and trading infrastructure. Our team is small, technical, and moves fast. Every engineer we hire has an outsized impact on the product and the company's trajectory. We're past the idea stage: the product is live, the team is scaling, and we're looking for someone who wants to help define how the product is built from the ground up rather than inherit someone else's architecture.

We can't share the company name publicly at this stage of the search, but we're happy to disclose it in a first conversation.

The Role

We're hiring a Founding Engineer to take ownership of our product end to end, with real depth on the client-facing experience. This is not a \"join an engineering team\" role. It's a \"be the person who shapes the architecture\" role. You'll make the foundational technical decisions (state management, application structure, APIs, performance, tooling) as much as you'll ship features.

We're open to engineers from a range of backgrounds: frontend-leaning full-stack, full-stack, or frontend engineers with real backend and systems depth. You don't need to have held a \"Founding Engineer\" title before. What matters is that you're comfortable owning a lot of surface area, making architectural calls without a big team to lean on, and moving with the pace and ambiguity of an early-stage environment.

What You'll Do

• Own and lead development of a consumer-facing trading and markets product, where performance and correctness both matter
• Make architectural decisions across the stack, from the UI and complex application state to the APIs and data flows behind it
• Build fast, reliable, real-time experiences and ship them quickly
• Work directly with the founders to turn product vision into a polished, production-grade product
• Set the technical standards (code quality, testing, tooling, performance) as the team grows
• Make pragmatic build-vs-perfect tradeoffs appropriate to an early-stage company, without cutting corners that create real risk

What We're Looking For

• Strong hands-on experience with React, Next.js, and TypeScript in production
• Comfort working across the stack: you can design and build APIs and services, and you understand how the pieces fit together, not only the UI layer
• A track record of owning a substantial piece of a product, not just contributing to one, even if that wasn't at an official \"founding\" company
• Comfort working independently and making architectural decisions with minimal oversight
• Genuine interest in fintech, trading, or markets-adjacent products. Prior domain experience is a strong plus but not required if you can show sharp product judgment
• Roughly 2–8 years of professional engineering experience
• A history of sticking with roles and seeing projects through. We're looking for someone who wants to build something over years, not months
• Based in or willing to relocate to the NYC metro area; this is an on-site role in Chelsea

What Would Make You a Great Fit

• You've been the sole or primary owner of a significant codebase or product before, at any size company
• You care as much about how something feels to use as how it's built
• You're energized, not intimidated, by having no large team to hide behind
• You want real ownership and are comfortable with the tradeoff that comes with it: high autonomy, high accountability

What This Role Is Not

• This is not a role for someone who wants a large, established team structure around them
• This is not a short-term contract engagement. We're hiring for a long-term, foundational team member

What We Offer

• Up to $260K base salary, depending on experience
• 1–2% equity — true founding-engineer ownership
• Direct work with the founders on product and technical direction
• A fast process: we can run the entire interview process in about two weeks and are committed to filling this role quickly