Founding Engineer

Palo Alto, CA · On-site (5 days/week) · Full-time
Compensation: $165,000 – $210,000 + 0.2% – 0.5% equity

About the Company

Our client is a seed-stage B2B software company building the system of record for headcount planning. Their platform sits between HR, recruiting and finance systems and keeps all three aligned in real time, so growing companies always know where their headcount actually stands. They are already live with more than ten enterprise customers, including several of the best-known technology companies in the US, and are backed by top-tier venture investors. The founding team previously ran engineering and product at a company they helped scale from under 50 people to roughly 900.

The Role

This is a founding engineering hire on a small core team. You would work directly with the founders and with early enterprise customers, own significant parts of the product end to end, and help push the company toward product-market fit. It suits someone who moves fast, makes sensible trade-offs, and wants their work in front of real users quickly.

What you'll be doing

• Ship and iterate quickly while staying thoughtful about quality trade-offs
• Work with the founders to design the right solution to real customer problems
• Talk directly to customers to diagnose and resolve issues in the product
• Own large parts of the product independently, from technical design through to production
• Wear multiple hats across engineering, product and customer support

Tech stack: GCP, MongoDB, TypeScript, NodeJS

Requirements

• At least two years building full stack software in a professional setting
• Experience inside a venture-backed startup, ideally as a founder or early engineer. Equivalent experience at a larger company taking projects from nothing to launch also works
• Strong systems design and data modeling ability, since the product lives or dies on how well the underlying data is structured
• Genuine feel for the product and the person using it, not just the code behind it
• A track record of self-starting, whether that is delivering something the company had not asked for or building substantial side projects of your own
• Comfortable in a very small team, moving between engineering, product and customer conversations as needed
• Able to get productive in an unfamiliar stack quickly. No specific language or framework is required
• Degree in computer science or engineering. A well-regarded programme is a plus rather than a requirement

Nice to Haves

• Time spent working alongside customers or internal teams to shape what gets built
• Background in B2B software, particularly HR or finance tooling

Why Join

• A genuine founding-engineer seat on a six-person team, with the ownership and equity that comes with it
• Enterprise customers and real usage already in place, so your work ships to people who depend on it
• Direct access to the founders and to customers, with no layers in between
• Hard, interesting problems in systems design and data modeling across a modern stack

Details

• Location · Palo Alto, CA
• Work policy · On-site, in person 5 days per week
• Compensation · $165,000 – $210,000 + 0.2% – 0.5% equity
• Visa sponsorship · Open to visa transfers, including OPT and H-1B transfers. H-1B transfers only, no new petitions
• Employment type · Full-time