Founding Engineer

## About the role You are the first full-time engineer. You own the technical build end-to-end — backend, AI/ML layer, frontend, and infrastructure. You work directly with the founder. There's no team to hand things off to, no PM buffer, and no ambiguity about ownership. That's the point. This is a founding role in every meaningful sense. You'll make architectural decisions that determine how this scales from one PE firm to fifty. You'll ship things that go in front of real customers. You'll have full context on the business and full authority over the stack. ## What you'll build - Multi-tenant SaaS platform serving PE firms and portfolio companies — security and data isolation - Three core intelligence modules: PIA360™ (leadership assessment), AIVA™ (AI value absorption), and COVA™ (organizational signal) - AI/ML layer: survey signal processing, factor analysis outputs, regression modeling, and natural language interpretation of qualitative interview data - Data utilities layer: ingestion, normalization, validation, and benchmarking infrastructure - Admin panel, JWT authentication, and tenant isolation — Phase Zero completion is the immediate first milestone - API architecture designed for enterprise clients and eventual third-party integrations ## What's already in place - Live Supabase database with multi-tenant architecture, row-level security, and nine core tables with real seed data - UX/UI prototype (Lovable) covering all three intelligence modules - Formal platform architecture document — full data schema, build roadmap, and developer handoff brief - Defined Phase Zero completion checklist ready for immediate execution You're not starting from zero. You're inheriting a well-defined architecture and a founder who has already made the hard structural decisions correctly. ## What we're looking for - 5+ years building production SaaS systems — multi-tenant architecture is a hard requirement - Strong full-stack capability: backend APIs, relational databases (Supabase/PostgreSQL), and enough frontend to ship - AI/ML experience: familiarity with embeddings, RAG pipelines, and integrating LLM outputs into structured data workflows - Systems thinker — you build for scale on day one, not after the rewrite - High autonomy, low ego. You'll work with a non-technical founder who won't second-guess your architecture — and expects you to own it completely - Startup experience required; early-stage preference strongly weighted ## What this is not This is equity-only at this stage. No salary until funding closes. If that's a dealbreaker, this isn't the right fit. If you want to own a meaningful piece of an intelligence platform with validated methodology, real customer demand, and a clear path to institutional capital — read on. ## Compensation - Equity: meaningful founding-level stake: 7-10% ## To apply Tell us what you've built, what broke, and what you'd do differently. That's more useful than a resume.