Founding Engineer

Location: New York, NY
Company Stage of Funding: Seed Stage (YC-Backed, $2M Raised)
Office Type: Onsite (5 Days Per Week)
Salary: $200,000–$250,000 + 0.5–2.0% Equity

Company Description

We're representing a YC-backed infrastructure startup building the deployment platform for mission-critical enterprise software. Their technology enables AI and enterprise software vendors to deploy applications directly into customer-controlled cloud environments, helping organizations maintain security, compliance, and data ownership without sacrificing deployment velocity.

Founded by operators with experience leading enterprise deployments across healthcare, finance, defense, and Fortune 100 organizations, the company is rethinking how modern software reaches highly regulated industries. As one of the earliest engineers, you'll have the opportunity to shape both the product and technical architecture while helping build foundational infrastructure from first principles.

What You Will Do

• Design and build distributed systems that orchestrate software deployment across hundreds of enterprise environments.
• Develop core platform infrastructure that enables secure, reliable, and automated application delivery.
• Build developer tooling, deployment workflows, and control-plane services that improve customer experience and operational efficiency.
• Work across the stack, contributing to backend services, APIs, platform infrastructure, developer experience tooling, and customer-facing features.
• Partner directly with founders to define system architecture, engineering standards, and long-term technical strategy.
• Build highly available systems that support deployment, monitoring, configuration management, and infrastructure automation.
• Debug and optimize complex distributed systems running in production environments.
• Evaluate technical tradeoffs between performance, reliability, scalability, and product velocity.
• Own projects from concept through deployment and ongoing operational support.
• Help establish the engineering culture and technical foundation of a rapidly growing startup.

Ideal Background

• 1+ years of professional software engineering experience, ideally in high-growth startup environments.
• Proven experience building products or infrastructure from 0-to-1.
• Strong full-stack engineering capabilities with experience owning projects end-to-end.
• Experience building developer tools, deployment infrastructure, platform tooling, or infrastructure products.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and modern cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals with the ability to work across distributed systems and platform architecture.
• Demonstrated ownership mentality and ability to move quickly in ambiguous environments.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field.

Preferred

• Experience with Go (Golang).
• Experience building Kubernetes operators, control planes, orchestration systems, or infrastructure platforms.
• Familiarity with Docker, Helm, Terraform, Pulumi, or infrastructure-as-code tooling.
• Experience at high-growth venture-backed companies or early-stage startups.
• Background in developer tooling, cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, DevOps products, or deployment systems.
• Experience with React, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, and cloud-native application development.
• Strong interest in enterprise infrastructure, security, compliance, and deployment automation.
• Previous founding engineer, startup founder, or early employee experience.

Compensation and Benefits

• Base salary: $200,000–$250,000.
• Equity: 0.5–2.0%.
• Company-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance.
• Unlimited PTO and sick leave.
• Annual professional development stipend.
• Company-provided lunches, dinners, and coffee.
• Annual company retreats and team offsites.
• Opportunity to join as an early employee with significant ownership and influence over product direction.
• Direct access to founders and the ability to shape engineering culture from the ground floor.
• Work on highly technical infrastructure challenges serving healthcare, finance, manufacturing, defense, and other regulated industries.