Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer

Location

New York, NY

Work Arrangement: On-site — 5 days per week in New York City (non-negotiable)
Position: Full-time
Company Stage: Early-stage, Seed
Experience: 3–10 years of professional experience (up to approximately 15 years for candidates from larger organizations)
Compensation: $175,000–$250,000 base salary
Equity: 0.5%–1.25% founding-engineer equity
Visa: Must already be authorized to work in the U.S. — no visa sponsorship or transfers
Relocation: Relocation support is not available

Company Description

We are building a technology-driven financial services company focused on modernizing trust administration through purpose-built software.

Operating as a regulated fiduciary, the company manages complex trust structures and financial workflows while maintaining a high standard of accuracy, security, and compliance. Its platform is designed from the ground up to combine AI-assisted workflows with deterministic controls, extensive testing, and multiple layers of data protection.

The product supports the administration of trusts, including client onboarding, financial accounting, document processing, compliance monitoring, beneficiary communications, and distributions. Rather than relying on legacy platforms, the company has built its own software to handle the complexity of fiduciary operations.

The business has launched publicly and is already serving clients. It is backed by leading technology investors and experienced founders, with a $10M seed round and strong early interest from the startup ecosystem.

You'll join a small, highly driven team at an early stage, working directly with the founders and an experienced engineering team. As a Founding Engineer, you'll have significant ownership over the product, architecture, and technical direction as the company scales.

What You Will Do

• Build agent-driven workflows: Design and develop AI-powered workflows for fiduciary operations, including transaction monitoring, proposed distributions, document extraction and versioning, compliance monitoring, and beneficiary notifications.

• Own AI evaluation infrastructure: Build and improve the agent evaluation and annotation loop, including golden test sets, repeatable evaluation hooks, agent harnesses, and LLM evaluations integrated into CI/CD.

• Extend the fiduciary ledger: Develop and improve financial accounting systems that handle income and principal accounting on top of double-entry accounting, including complex events such as splits, mergers, and corporate accounts.

• Build for correctness: Implement strong correctness guarantees at the database and API layers, using constraints, checks, and deterministic validation for sensitive financial workflows.

• Work directly with customers and the business: Join onboarding calls, understand operational pain points, and translate user needs into product requirements, technical designs, and an actionable engineering backlog.

• Build financial and compliance integrations: Develop integrations with payment providers, compliance vendors, custodians, and other financial systems. Make thoughtful build-versus-buy decisions with security and correctness in mind.

• Design security-first infrastructure: Build and improve authentication, envelope encryption, audit logging, and observability systems to protect sensitive financial and client data.

• Contribute across the product: Work on frontend experiences using the existing design system and component library, making complex trust and legal structures easier to understand.

• Own projects end to end: Take initiatives from initial problem discovery and architecture through implementation, deployment, and ongoing iteration.

• Shape the technical foundation: Help establish the architecture, engineering practices, and systems the company will rely on as it grows.

Ideal Candidate Background

Required Experience

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience, with approximately 3–10 years being the ideal range.

• Experience building and shipping production software, primarily on the backend.

• A track record of taking projects from an initial idea or blank page through production delivery.

• Experience working at an early- or mid-stage startup, ideally Series B or earlier.

• Ability to own multiple technical domains and projects simultaneously in an environment with limited structure.

• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to translate user problems into technical requirements, priorities, and an engineering backlog.

• Strong relational database fundamentals, particularly PostgreSQL.

• Experience building reliable production systems where data integrity and correctness matter.

• Practical experience using AI coding tools and AI agents as part of everyday engineering work.

• Ability to make independent technical decisions and take responsibility for outcomes.

• Comfort working directly with founders, business stakeholders, and customers.

• Willingness to contribute across the backend, frontend, infrastructure, and product as needed.

• Ability to work on-site in New York City five days per week.

• Must already have U.S. work authorization. The company cannot sponsor or transfer visas.

Technical Skills

Core Engineering

• Backend software engineering.

• Production systems and application architecture.

• Relational database design and data integrity.

• PostgreSQL and database constraints.

• API design and development.

• Full-stack product development.

• CI/CD and production deployment.

• AI-assisted software development.

• System reliability, security, and observability.

Relevant Technologies

• Backend: Go.

• Database: PostgreSQL, database constraints, checks, and relational data modeling.

• Frontend: React, TypeScript, Next.js.

• AI and agent infrastructure: LLM agents, agentic workflows, MCP servers, agent harnesses, LLM evaluations, and annotation loops.

• Infrastructure and delivery: CI/CD, automated testing, and deployment workflows.

• Observability: Honeycomb, PostHog.

• Financial integrations: Payment rails, compliance providers, custodians, and financial systems.

Candidates do not need experience with every technology listed. Go and React experience are not mandatory. Prioritize strong backend engineering fundamentals, deep PostgreSQL knowledge, production ownership, and the ability to build reliable systems. Solid relational database and PostgreSQL skills are particularly important.

Preferred Background

• Experience as a Founding Engineer or an early engineering hire at a startup.

• Experience taking products or major systems from zero to production.

• Applied AI experience, particularly agent harnesses, evaluation frameworks, annotation loops, or MCP.

• Experience building agentic workflows for real-world production use cases.

• Deep PostgreSQL experience, including database-level constraints and data modeling.

• Strong DevOps, infrastructure, or CI/CD experience.

• Experience in fintech, financial infrastructure, banking, payments, or regulated environments.

• Experience with security-sensitive systems and sensitive data.

• Experience with double-entry accounting, financial ledgers, or complex financial data models.

• Experience integrating third-party financial, payment, or compliance systems.

• Experience working directly with customers or operational teams to shape product requirements.

Working Style and Culture

• High ownership: Takes responsibility for projects and outcomes rather than waiting for assigned tickets.

• Autonomous: Can identify problems, define requirements, prioritize work, and build solutions independently.

• Product-minded: Understands user pain points and translates them into practical product and engineering improvements.

• Hands-on: Enjoys writing code and shipping production systems across different areas of the product.

• AI-forward: Uses AI coding tools and agent workflows regularly as part of the development process.

• Pragmatic: Balances speed of execution with correctness, reliability, and security.

• Adaptable: Comfortable working across multiple domains in a small company with limited structure.

• Collaborative: Enjoys working closely with founders, engineers, and business stakeholders.

• Long-term thinker: Makes architectural decisions with the company's future technical needs in mind.

Compensation and Benefits

• Base salary: $175,000–$250,000.

• Equity: 0.5%–1.25% founding-engineer equity.

• Vesting: Four-year vesting schedule with a one-year cliff.

• Bonus: No bonus structure currently.

• Work arrangement: Full-time, on-site in New York City five days per week.

• Visa: No visa sponsorship or transfers.

• Relocation: Relocation support is not available.

Why Join?

• Founding-level ownership: Take significant responsibility for building and shaping the product from an early stage.

• Build from the ground up: Work on production systems and core infrastructure rather than maintaining legacy software.

• Work at the intersection of AI and financial infrastructure: Build practical AI-driven workflows for complex, high-stakes financial operations.

• Own meaningful technical problems: Work on agentic workflows, financial ledgers, data integrity, security, and complex integrations.

• Work directly with experienced founders: Collaborate closely with the founding team and help shape product and engineering decisions.

• Influence the architecture: Help establish the technical foundation and engineering practices the company will build on for years.

• Meaningful equity: Receive 0.5%–1.25% founding-engineer equity alongside a competitive base salary.

• Join a live product: Build and improve a product that is already launched and serving clients.