Founding / Lead Software Engineer - Go, React & AI Systems

Job Description

Job Description

Founding / Lead Software Engineer — Go, React & AI Systems

Atlanta Area | In Office 5 Days Per Week | Significant Growth & Equity Opportunity

This is NOT a remote or hybrid position.

We’re looking for someone who wants to help build a software company — not simply work for one.

If you’re primarily looking for a predictable 9-to-5 engineering position, this probably isn’t the right opportunity.

If you want to get in early, build something significant, take real ownership, and have the opportunity to lead the engineering organization you help create, keep reading.

What We’re Building:

We’re building a cloud-based, closed-loop operating platform for the automotive service industry.

The platform encompasses:

• Shop management.
• Customer and vehicle management.
• Estimates and repair orders.
• Scheduling and workflow.
• Accounts payable automation.
• Document reconciliation.
• Accounting.
• Payroll.
• Inventory and purchasing.
• Payments and financial reconciliation.
• AI agents and intelligent automation.

These aren’t intended to become disconnected applications.

Every system shares information. Every workflow feeds another workflow. The objective is to create a platform capable of operating increasingly large portions of an automotive service business intelligently and automatically.

We’re building the operating system for an automotive service company.

And we’re building it from inside the industry.

Why This Is Different:

• This isn’t a software idea developed by people trying to understand an industry from the outside.
• The founder currently owns and operates multiple automotive repair facilities across multiple states and has firsthand experience with the operational, financial, staffing, accounting, and technology problems we’re solving.
• He has also previously founded an automotive software company whose technology is currently used by large national automotive repair organizations.
• We understand the customer because we are the customer.
• We have operating businesses where technology can be developed, tested, refined, and proven against real-world problems.
• Now we’re looking for the technical leader who can help turn that experience into a scalable software company.

Software Development Has Changed:

• We believe the future belongs to engineers who can effectively direct AI systems, evaluate their output, and make sound engineering decisions at extraordinary speed.
• The bottleneck is no longer typing code.

The bottleneck is judgment:

• AI can generate thousands of lines of code before lunch.
• The hard part is determining what should be built, designing the architecture correctly, recognizing when generated code is wrong, protecting data integrity, and making decisions that still look intelligent years later.
• We use AI-assisted and agentic development extensively.
• You’ll use AI to accelerate implementation, analyze existing systems, generate and review code, create tests, investigate failures, and increase what a small engineering organization can accomplish.
• But AI doesn’t replace engineering judgment.
• It makes engineering judgment more valuable.

Our Technology:

Our platform includes:

• Go — primary backend services and APIs
• PostgreSQL — primary relational database
• React — frontend applications
• Rust — performance-sensitive and specialized services
• Python — automation, AI, data processing, and supporting services
• AI Agents — autonomous and semi-autonomous workflows
• AWS — cloud infrastructure
• Git/GitHub — source control and development workflow

You don’t need to be the world’s leading expert in every technology on this list.

You do need to be capable of understanding complex systems, learning quickly, and making good technical decisions.

What We’re Actually Looking For:

Technical ability is only part of this position.

We’re looking for an entrepreneurial engineer:

• Someone who sees a problem and starts figuring out how to solve it.
• Someone who doesn’t wait for a perfectly written specification.
• Someone capable of questioning the founder when there’s a better technical approach.
• Someone who thinks about customers, revenue, scalability, reliability, and execution — not just code.
• Someone who understands that getting a product into customers’ hands matters.
• Someone willing to work intensely when that’s what it takes to reach an important milestone.
• And someone who wants their responsibility and compensation to grow as the company grows.
• You should be able to operate independently today and have the potential to lead other developers tomorrow.

What You’ll Do Initially:

At the beginning, this is a hands-on engineering position.

You’ll be expected to:

• Learn and take ownership of an existing cloud-based platform.
• Build backend systems primarily in Go.
• Build and improve React applications.
• Design and maintain PostgreSQL databases.
• Work with Rust and Python services where appropriate.
• Design and implement AI-agent workflows.
• Review, challenge, test, and improve AI-generated implementations.
• Diagnose problems across frontend, backend, databases, AI systems, and AWS infrastructure.
• Protect security, reliability, and data integrity.
• Take business problems from concept through architecture, implementation, deployment, and production.
• Help us move aggressively toward a commercially deployable product.

There won’t always be a ticket telling you what to do next.

Sometimes you’ll be given a business problem and expected to determine what the technical solution should be.

Where This Can Go:

We’re not hiring someone simply to fill an engineering seat.

We’re looking for someone who has the potential to become a technical leader of the company.

Initially, you’ll build.

As the company grows, we expect the engineering organization to grow with it.

The right person should be capable of eventually:

• Recruiting and evaluating developers.
• Establishing engineering standards.
• Reviewing architecture and technical decisions.
• Managing development priorities.
• Leading other engineers.
• Building an effective AI-augmented development organization.
• Taking increasing responsibility for the technical direction of the platform.
• Helping carry the company from product development through commercialization and scale.

Your title, responsibility, and compensation should be capable of growing with what you accomplish.

Entrepreneurial Experience Matters:

• If you’ve founded a company, attempted a startup, built a product on your own, operated a side business, launched a SaaS product, or taken something from an idea to paying customers, we want to hear about it.
• It doesn’t have to have succeeded.
• In fact, we’re interested in what you learned when something didn’t work.
• We value people who understand the difference between building software and building a business.

Who Will Thrive Here:

• You’ll probably thrive here if you’re self-directed, competitive with yourself, intellectually curious, comfortable with ambiguity, and energized by responsibility.
• You’d rather own a problem than receive a task.
• You care about getting the architecture right, but you also understand that a product has to ship.
• You know the difference between technical debt worth accepting and technical debt that will eventually cripple a company.
• You can move quickly without becoming careless.
• You can disagree constructively.
• You can make a decision with incomplete information and change course when the evidence changes.
• And when something breaks, your instinct is to understand why and fix the underlying problem.

Who Probably Won’t Enjoy This

This probably isn’t the right position if you’re looking for:

• A remote or hybrid job.
• A highly structured corporate environment.
• A predictable queue of tickets.
• Someone else to make every important decision.
• A position where responsibility ends at 5:00 PM regardless of what’s happening with the product.
• Or a role where career progression is primarily determined by time served.
• We’re building a company. There will be periods when getting something across the finish line requires more than a normal week.
• That should be something you understand going in.

Compensation, Growth & Equity:

• We’ll be transparent.
• Our initial cash compensation may be below what a large technology company can offer for someone with comparable ability.
• But this isn’t intended to be a large-company compensation model.
• We’re looking for someone who wants their upside connected to what they help build.
• For the right candidate, meaningful equity participation can be part of the compensation package.
• As the product reaches customers, generates revenue, and the company grows, there is significant opportunity for increased compensation, responsibility, and leadership.

The objective is straightforward:

• If you help create substantial value, there should be an opportunity for you to participate in that value.
• Benefits include health, dental and vision insurance, 401(k) with company match, paid vacation, and paid holidays.

How to Apply:

• Don’t send us a generic cover letter.
• Show us something you’ve built.
• Something you owned.
• Something where the important decisions were yours.

Tell us:

• What did you build?
• What problem were you solving?
• What part did you personally own?
• What were the hardest technical decisions?
• What tradeoffs did you make?
• What happened when something went wrong?
• What would you do differently today?

Then answer three questions:

• Tell us about something entrepreneurial you’ve attempted. What happened, and what did you learn?
• Tell us about a time AI generated a technical solution that looked correct but wasn’t. How did you recognize the problem?
• If you joined a small software company with a working product, limited engineering resources, and a mandate to get paying customers onto the platform as quickly as responsibly possible, what would you focus on during your first 90 days?

We’re less interested in the polish of your résumé than in how you think.

If there’s something you’ve built that other people never fully appreciated, start there.

Atlanta-area candidates only. This position requires working in the office five days per week.