Founding Engineer

The role

We're looking for a Founding Engineer to become the most senior technical contributor on the ground locally, working directly alongside the CTO. You'll take full-stack ownership across the platform (application, infrastructure and tooling), while providing technical leadership to a small team of engineers based in India.

This is primarily a hands-on individual contributor role. You'll be writing code every day, making pragmatic architecture decisions, and helping establish the engineering standards and practices that will carry our organization through its next stage of growth.

What you'll own

• Full-stack platform development: feature development across the React/TypeScript frontend and Node.js/Express backend
• Infrastructure and IaC: leading the migration to Terraform-managed infrastructure on AWS (ECS Fargate, RDS PostgreSQL, ALB, ECR, Secrets Manager and more)
• Integration connectors: designing and building new platform connectors and extending existing ones as the supported platform catalogue grows
• Security and compliance posture: contributing to the ongoing ISO 27001 certification effort, pen test remediation, and AWS security services (CloudTrail, GuardDuty, Config)
• CI/CD and developer tooling: maintaining and improving GitHub Actions-based deployment pipelines across staging and production environments
• Technical leadership: quality standards across the engineering team through code reviews and best-practices
• On-call shared responsibility: sharing critical incident response with the CTO on a rotating basis

About you

• Demonstrated startup experience, you understand the trade-offs between moving fast and building well
• 8+ years experience building production-grade software
• Deep familiarity with DevOps using AWS and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions or equivalent)
• Experience providing technical leadership or mentoring and have previously held senior roles within engineering (Tech Lead / Staff Engineer / Principal Engineer)
• Experience building or maintaining third-party API integrations within applications
• Pioneer AI developer tooling workflows that boost engineering productivity
• Right to work in Australia

Highly desirable

• Cross-functional communicator, capable of simplifying complex technical concepts for other teams and customers
• Experience with multi-tenant SaaS architecture
• Familiarity with OAuth 2.0, API key management, and credential security patterns
• Exposure to security frameworks or compliance programmes (ISO 27001, SOC 2, or similar)
• Background in MSP, ITSM, or enterprise software

Working at our organization

• Compensation: $160,000 – $200,000 base salary + superannuation + incentives
• Hours: Flexible - it's about output, not hours. Aside from office attendance, you'll need to be available for some overlap with our India-based team and share on-call critical incident coverage with the CTO on a rotating basis. On-call is not high-frequency but requires genuine availability when it matters.
• Stage: Funded, early-stage startup. The company has paying customers, live infrastructure, and a clear product direction but also the ambiguity and pace that comes with being a small team building something new.

Interview process

1. Screening call (~15 min) - a brief introductory conversation
2. Technical interview with the CTO (~60-90 min) - work through a problem where you will apply your AI-enabled development process and tooling; we want to understand how you work with AI in your day-to-day engineering. Afterwards, we will have a two-way Q&A - your opportunity to dig into the technical challenges, the codebase, and the team as much as ours to learn about you
3. Meet with the CEO (~30 min) - an in-person, non-technical chat to explore how we work, what matters to you, and whether this is the right environment for both sides