Founding Software Engineer, Data Platform

Lemon.io is a curated marketplace that connects startups and scaleups with pre-vetted senior software engineers. Founded in 2015 in Kyiv, the company has grown to 60+ people, 1,500+ vetted developers across 40+ countries, and ~2.3 million cumulative work-hours logged on the platform. 
The business runs on one core bet: the quality of talent matching defines everything. 
Tens of millions of profiles carry signals that are mostly underused for understanding who will fit best for what job. We're hiring our first engineer to change that. This person will own a brand-new internal data platform from zero: designing and building how we gather, structure, and surface developer intelligence so the business can match faster, smarter, and at scale.
This is a founding, senior/staff-level role. You won't inherit a codebase or join a squad – you'll make the architectural decisions, pick the stack, and ship the first version. You'll work directly with stakeholders across whole org to understand what data matters most and build the system that makes it valuable.
EU timezone preferred. Remote.

Must-have:

• Hands-on experience building data/platform products (not just consuming data – creating and designing how it's collected, structured, and served)
• At least one 0 -> 1 greenfield build – took something from "nothing exists yet" to a working system in production
  Strong backend foundation – can make architectural decisions and own them
• English B2 or higher
• Strong written and verbal communication – can articulate technical decisions to non-technical people and drive alignment async
• Data pipeline design and implementation – ingestion, cleaning, enrichment, serving
• Search and indexing systems (Elasticsearch or similar)
• Relational databases (PostgreSQL or similar)
• Cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) – can provision and operate services independently
• System architecture – can design a platform from scratch and make defensible trade-offs

Nice-to-have:

• Track record of working directly with non-technical stakeholders (product, ops, leadership)
• Reasonable infrastructure experience
• ML/AI experience (embeddings, NLP, classification)
• ETL orchestration tools (Airflow, dbt, Dagster)
• Data warehouse experience (BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift)

What you'll get:

• Startup culture with open communication. Our current eNPS score is 82. 
• Competitive salary in USD
• Full remote work with flexible working hours
• 28 working days of vacation a year
• 7 days of sick leave
• Annual reimbursements for things that matter to us: health, self-development, travelling, home office upgrade, mental wellness etc.
• Help with maintaining your Ukrainian PE.