Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Founding Engineer

🎯 Role Definition

Are you a builder at heart, driven by the challenge of turning a vision into a tangible, scalable product? This role requires an exceptional and entrepreneurial Founding Engineer to join our core team. This is a rare ground-floor opportunity to have a monumental impact, not just on our codebase, but on our product's direction, our engineering culture, and the very foundation of our company. You won't just be writing code; you'll be a strategic partner, a technical visionary, and a key architect of our future. If you thrive in ambiguity, are passionate about solving complex problems from first principles, and want to build something meaningful from 0 to 1, this role is for you.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior or Staff Software Engineer
Tech Lead or Engineering Lead
Entrepreneurial engineer from a previous startup
Engineering Manager looking to return to a hands-on builder role

Advancement To:

Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
VP of Engineering
Principal or Distinguished Engineer
Head of a future engineering division

Lateral Moves:

Head of Product
Principal Architect

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Architect, design, and implement our core product's foundational systems, making crucial early decisions on architecture, frameworks, and technologies that will shape our future.
Lead the end-to-end development of user-facing features, from conceptualization and UI/UX collaboration to back-end implementation and deployment.
Build and manage scalable, resilient, and secure cloud infrastructure from the ground up, utilizing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles.
Write high-quality, well-tested, and maintainable code across the entire stack (frontend, backend, database, and infrastructure).
Establish the initial engineering culture, best practices, and development processes, including CI/CD pipelines, code review standards, and testing strategies.
Collaborate directly with the founders to define the product roadmap, translate business goals into technical specifications, and rapidly iterate based on user feedback.
Take complete ownership of major product areas, driving them from a simple idea to a fully-fledged, production-ready solution.
Design and implement robust data models and manage database schemas, ensuring data integrity and performance as we scale.
Develop and integrate with third-party APIs, managing everything from authentication to data synchronization.
Implement comprehensive monitoring, logging, and alerting systems to ensure high availability and proactive issue resolution.
Champion security best practices across the entire development lifecycle, from code to cloud configuration.
Drive performance optimization initiatives across the application, identifying and resolving bottlenecks in the frontend, backend, and database layers.
Evaluate and prototype new technologies and tools, making pragmatic decisions about what to build versus what to buy.
Be a key voice in product strategy sessions, bringing a strong technical perspective to balance feasibility, complexity, and business value.
Mentor future engineering hires and play a critical role in building a world-class, diverse, and collaborative engineering team.
Wear multiple hats and jump on critical business and product needs as they arise, demonstrating a "no task is too small" attitude.
Build and maintain internal tools and automation to improve developer productivity and operational efficiency.
Define and manage our system's service-level objectives (SLOs) and error budgets to balance reliability with feature velocity.
Conduct technical interviews and assess candidates to help grow the engineering organization with top-tier talent.
Create and maintain clear, concise technical documentation for our architecture, systems, and processes to enable effective onboarding and knowledge sharing.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis to inform product decisions.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap for analytics and business intelligence.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Engage with early customers and users to gather direct feedback and troubleshoot technical issues.
Contribute to marketing and sales efforts by providing technical expertise for demos, documentation, and customer conversations.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Deep proficiency in one or more modern programming languages such as Python, Go, TypeScript/JavaScript, or Rust.
Expertise in developing and consuming RESTful or GraphQL APIs.
Strong experience with modern front-end frameworks like React, Vue.js, or Svelte.
Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure) and their core services (e.g., EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda).
Solid understanding of relational (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (e.g., MongoDB, DynamoDB) databases.
Experience with containerization and orchestration technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.
Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform or Pulumi.
Knowledge of modern CI/CD practices and tools (e.g., GitHub Actions, CircleCI).
Experience with system design and building scalable, distributed architectures.
Strong understanding of software security principles and best practices.

Soft Skills

Ownership Mentality: A deep sense of responsibility and accountability for your work and the company's success.
Ambiguity Tolerance: The ability to thrive and make progress in an unstructured, fast-changing environment.
Product-Minded: A genuine interest in the "why" behind what you're building and a focus on user impact.
Pragmatism: The ability to make smart trade-offs between speed, quality, and complexity.
Strong Communication: Excellent ability to articulate complex technical ideas to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Bias for Action: A proactive and resourceful approach to problem-solving, with a drive to get things done.
High Level of Autonomy: The ability to work independently, manage your own priorities, and drive projects to completion.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in a technical field or equivalent practical experience. We believe exceptional talent can come from any background.

Preferred Education:

Master's or PhD in Computer Science or a related discipline.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science
Software Engineering
Information Systems
Mathematics or Physics

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 5-10+ years of professional software development experience.

Preferred: Proven experience shipping products from 0 to 1 in a fast-paced environment, preferably within an early-stage startup. Demonstrable experience building and scaling complex software systems and a portfolio of projects (e.g., GitHub) that showcases your skills and passion for building.