Lead Software Engineer

Job DescriptionFounding Engineer — Confidential Search\n\nNew York City | Five days on-site in Manhattan\n$250,000–$500,000 base + up to 2% equity\nFull-time | No visa sponsorship available\n\nRight, the important bit first.\n\nThis isn’t one of those “Founding Engineer” jobs where you’ll arrive as employee 47 and spend your first month sitting in planning meetings.\n\nYou’ll be the first engineering hire, joining two founders in a small, seriously profitable business that has gone from zero to significant eight-figure revenue in under a year — without raising outside funding.\n\nThe company is building a real-time pricing and decisioning platform for a fast-moving consumer marketplace. The engineering problems look a lot like electronic trading: huge amounts of changing market data, automated bidding, live inventory and decisions where the financial impact shows up almost immediately.\n\nYou’ll sit beside the founders in the office and own the core technology behind it.\n\nWhat you’ll actually be doing\n\n• Building and owning the pricing engine, bidding infrastructure and data systems that power the platform\n• Turning AI and model research into production systems that run continuously\n• Building proper experimentation and A/B testing frameworks around pricing decisions\n• Improving the speed, throughput and reliability of the bidding systems\n• Creating AI-powered tooling for triage, production failures and model-drift detection\n• Making the big early architecture calls and setting the engineering standard as the team grows\n• Getting very close to the commercial side of the business — what you ship can affect revenue within hours\n\nThe non-negotiables\n\n• You have 3–10 years of professional software engineering experience\n• You have genuine 0→1 experience. You’ve personally taken an ambiguous product or technically difficult system from an idea into production — ideally as a founder, founding engineer or one of the first engineers\n• You’ve worked somewhere with a genuinely high engineering bar, whether that’s a top technology company or a smaller team solving very hard problems\n• You’ve designed, built and operated data-intensive production systems\n• You’re strong with Python, or close enough technically that moving into a Python-heavy environment won’t be an issue\n• You have proper platform, infrastructure or distributed-systems experience\n• You’re naturally good with data and comfortable making decisions when the information is incomplete, noisy or moving quickly\n• AI is already part of how you build. You’re using LLMs, agents and modern developer tooling in real work, not just playing around with them at the weekend\n• Your career shows progression, ownership and things you have actually shipped\n• You’re comfortable disagreeing with smart people, backing your opinion and changing it when the evidence proves you wrong\n• You’re still a very hands-on engineer. This isn’t a people-management or operations role\n• You can work on-site in Manhattan five days a week\n• You already have unrestricted US work authorisation. Unfortunately, sponsorship isn’t available\n\nYou’ll probably be especially interesting if\n\n• You’ve founded something yourself or joined very early and helped it achieve real commercial traction\n• You’ve built systems around pricing, trading, marketplaces, bidding or optimisation\n• You’ve worked on production AI, model evaluation, automated operations or experimentation\n• You’re interested in markets, pricing or trading systems\n• You have a strong computer science background\n\nWhy it’s worth a look\n\nYou’ll be joining a tiny, profitable team with no investors breathing down its neck and no layers of approval. There’s a lot still to build, the problems are properly difficult and the upside is real.\n\nYou won’t be handed a polished roadmap. You’ll work things out with the founders, challenge them when needed and take full ownership of what gets built.\n\nThe base salary is $250,000–$500,000, depending on experience and the level of impact you can have, with up to 2% equity on top.\n\nThe process\n\n1. A 30-minute chat with one of the founders\n2. A one-hour technical interview with the technical co-founder\n3. A take-home exercise\n4. A presentation of your work to the team\n5. A final on-site meeting\n\nIf it’s a strong fit on both sides, the whole thing can move from first chat to offer inside two weeks.\n\nWhen you apply, make it easy to see what you personally owned, what you built from 0→1 and what happened as a result. A list of technologies won’t tell the story — the interesting bit is what you actually built.