Own the platform end to end as the first engineering hire, building frontend, backend, data, infrastructure, and matching capabilities. Bring the outsourced codebase in-house, establish scalable architecture and engineering practices, use AI to accelerate development, and support live conference performance. Partner with leadership on product priorities, analytics, recommendations, and hiring while serving consumer attendees and enterprise organizers.
Founding Engineer - Early Stage
Location: New York City (in office 3–4 days/week) · Travel: Occasional, for key conferences · Reports to: Founder & CEO
About The Company
The Company is an early stage startup seeking to become the most effective B2B marketing platform for healthcare commercial teams - starting with the conference channel ($94B+ of spend and growing). We match professionals with the people most worth meeting, driving meaningful conversations and innovation across the industry. The Company is founded and led by an experienced go-to-market leader with a decade of experience in a health-tech and marketing space.
The role
As the Company's Founding Engineer and first engineering hire, you'll own the platform end to end: the matching engine that pairs professionals, the front-end platform attendees use onsite, and the tools organizers and marketing teams rely on to guide their in-person strategy. You'll bring our product in-house from an outsourced team, set the technical direction, and ship fast with AI at the core of how you work. This is a founding-team seat with a clear path to an executive role as the Company grows.
What you'll do
1. Own the platform end to end
- Build across the stack. Design, build, and ship features across frontend, backend, data, and infrastructure.
- Serve two audiences. Deliver a polished consumer experience for attendees and reliable enterprise tooling for organizers and marketing teams.
- Ship for live events. Keep the platform fast and stable when conferences go live.
2. Build the matching engine
- Develop matching and recommendations. Build and improve the models that rank and recommend the people most worth meeting and the conferences worth going to.
- Guide data analysis and testing. Measure match quality and engagement, build analytics dashboards and admin capabilities, and iterate on what drives meaningful connections.
3. Bring engineering in-house
- Own the transition. Take over the existing codebase from our outsourced team and fully in-source it within the first few months.
- Set the foundation. Choose the architecture, tooling, and practices the Company will scale on, and help hire the team as we grow.
- Move fast with AI. Use AI across the engineering workflow to ship at a pace well beyond a typical team of one.
4. Shape the product
- Partner on the roadmap. Work with the Founder and Chief of Staff to turn customer feedback into product priorities.
Do whatever it takes. Jump into any problem that moves the company forward. As our only engineer, you'll wear every technical hat, and you get to learn a ton across the business.
What you bring
- 4+ years as a full-stack software engineering experience, with machine learning experience as a big plus.
- Experience building both consumer-facing applications and enterprise software.
- Proficiency using AI tools to build, test, and scale quickly.
- A track record of owning systems end to end, from architecture to deployment and monitoring, with minimal support.
- Comfort taking over an existing codebase and transitioning work from an outsourced team.
- A scrappy, roll-up-your-sleeves mindset and comfort with ambiguity at an early-stage startup.
- Able to commute into NYC office 3–4 days per week.
Bonus points
- Experience with ML, especially matching, recommendation, or ranking systems
- Experience as an early or founding engineer at a startup
- Experience in healthcare, health-tech, or the events and conference industry
- Experience with security and handling customer/consumer data
Current Tech Stack
- Cloud & hosting: AWS
- Web app: S3 + CloudFront
- API: Docker containers on ECS Fargate, behind API Gateway
- Database: Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL
- File storage: private S3 buckets with time-limited signed URLs
- Config & secrets: AWS SSM Parameter Store / Secrets Manager
- Logging & monitoring: Amazon CloudWatch
- Authentication: Amazon Cognito, with email/password, Google and Microsoft sign-in (Microsoft goes through Auth0)
- Languages & frameworks: TypeScript across the whole codebase
- Frontend: React (Vite), TanStack Router and TanStack Query
- Backend: Node.js with NestJS (REST API), Drizzle ORM and Zod validation
- AI: Anthropic Claude, JEV
- Third-party services: Google Calendar & Microsoft Outlook, Pusher, Resend, Amazon SES
- Other: Mixpanel, Retool, GitHub, pnpm + Turborepo monorepo, Vitest/Playwright
Why join
- Work directly alongside the Founder/CEO as a core member of the founding team
- Real ownership and a fast track to an executive leadership role
- Build the Company's technical foundation from day one
- Help shape how healthcare professionals drive innovation in a crucial industry
- Competitive salary and meaningful early-employee equity
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