Founding Engineer (Tech Lead)

You own the outcomes. You take an ambiguous business problem and turn it into clear requirements, a design with clear business rationale, sequenced work, and a realistic estimate, build the hardest parts yourself, and multiply a team of mid-level engineers with well-defined, extensible work and the reviews that keep quality high. You stay an IC at heart while making the work legible, sized, and worth doing.

What you'll do

• Deliver the highest-risk work yourself: Be the IC where it matters. Personally engineer the most complex, business-critical components, from cross-service logic to the boundary where AI outputs become deterministic, auditable actions, and set the technical bar for the team as you go.
• Turn business goals into shipped projects: Take an ambiguous problem and own it through to delivery, defining requirements, a design that starts from customer impact and takes the highest-ROI path whether it's make or buy, sequenced work, estimates, and clear engineering acceptance criteria a team can execute with minimal churn.
• Design complex systems that don't break down in 12 months: Architect entire systems so the likely next requirement plugs in cleanly through configuration or a new adapter, keeping components reusable and loosely coupled, separating business logic from shared services, and maintaining a single authoritative, append-only source of truth for critical data.
• Scale the team's autonomy and quality: Set decision thresholds so engineers self-serve low-stakes calls, define sanctioned paths for experimenting with regulated data, and spread understanding of our systems to cut key-person risk. Settle design in review, then build the road to production: CI/CD with quality gates, automated migrations, and systems that report their own health.
• Wow our customers: You solve for the customer's actual problem, not just the request, and measure success by customer outcomes.

What you'll need

• Typically 8+ years of professional software engineering, with a track record of shipping in fast-paced, ambiguous environments. Regulated industry and/or VC-backed startup experiences are a plus.
• A hands-on builder who ships the hard things, and who naturally thinks in business outcomes, work packages, ROI, and extensibility.
• Proven ability to write requirements and designs from business context, break them into estimated, sequenced work, and drive a project to completion in a tool like Linear.
• Deep proficiency in Python is mandatory, with strong command of REST API design, relational data modeling, and layered, service-oriented architecture.
• Real experience building LLM/agentic tooling, and understanding how to bound probabilistic output with deterministic code.
• You lift the people around you through design review, coaching, and clear direction, and you enjoy doing it.

What they offer

• Ownership of whole product areas with latitude to shape what you build and how you scope, sequence, and ship it.
• Work directly with founders who have built and scaled fintech and analytics products before.
• A dedicated development budget for your growth and development.
• Strong focus on a healthy, high-performance team culture with regular team events and dinners.