Founding Full-Stack Engineer

Compensation: $25k – $35k • 0.5% – 2.0%

About Ungu Ungu is an AI-assisted media planning platform by Taman Warna, a company based out of Singapore.. We are launching soon in Singapore, with Thailand, Australia and the USA on the roadmap. You would be our first in-house engineering hire, working alongside our fractional CTO and, for now, our external development partner.

The Role In your first few months, this is a hands-on individual contributor role. You will take ownership of our existing codebase, get deeply familiar with how it works, and become the person who makes improvements quickly and reliably. That means a steady flow of small-to-mid fixes and features, plus ownership of a few mid-sized workstreams end to end.

We may continue to use our external development partner for larger, scoped-out projects. Your role is to be the engineer that unblocks the business day-to-day.

Beyond the first few months, as Ungu expands into new media channels and markets beyond Singapore, the role is expected to evolve into technical leadership of a small, distributed team. Those future hires will likely be based in-market to work alongside local data partners, broadcasters, and media owners whose teams operate in Thai, Bahasa, Vietnamese, or other local languages. You do not need to speak those languages yourself, but you should be someone who could eventually lead people who do.

This is a founding engineer role, not a mid-level hire. You will need to hold context across the full stack, the LLM conversational layer, and the algorithmic planning engine. You will work closely with the CEO on product decisions and with the fractional CTO on architecture.

What You Will Do • Take over the codebase. Inherit, understand, and become the go-to owner of the existing Ungu codebase built by our external development partner. • Ship a steady flow of changes. Small fixes, testing feedback, incremental improvements, and small-to-mid features. The kind of work that does not justify a new scope with an external agency, but adds up to the majority of day-to-day product progress. • Own mid-sized workstreams end to end. For example, leading implementation of our measurement framework, together with an SME in the media measurement space • Work across the full stack. Front-end (user-facing planning interface), back-end (algorithms, data pipelines, API integrations), and the LLM conversational layer. • Own the LLM layer. Design, refine, and evaluate prompts for the conversational planning assistant. Build guardrails so the LLM never touches restricted data sources directly. • Integrate data sources. Work with feeds and APIs from partners like GfK, Nielsen and others. • Contribute to the planning engine. Extend our deterministic planning algorithms across new channels and markets. • Grow into team leadership over time. Document what you build, shape engineering standards, and, as we expand market by market, help hire and eventually lead a distributed team of engineers across SEA.

What We Are Looking For Must-haves • Three to six years of full-stack experience shipping production software, with genuine breadth across front-end and back-end. • Experience with AWS cloud infrastructure • Demonstrated prompt engineering capability. You have built features on top of LLM APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI, or similar), understand structured outputs, evals, and guardrails, and can show us work you have shipped. • Strong data and algorithmic thinking. You are comfortable working with relational data, ETL pipelines, and writing non-trivial business logic. Ungu is not a CRUD app; the planning engine is where the value lives. • Ownership instinct. You are happy being the person who decides, ships, and fixes, without waiting for a scrum master to tell you what to do. • Clear communicator. You can explain technical trade-offs to a non-technical founder and translate fuzzy product intent into shipped code. • Comfort inheriting someone else's code. Much of your first year will be spent working in a codebase built by others. You are the kind of engineer who enjoys getting under the hood, understanding what is there, and improving it rather than rewriting for the sake of it.

Nice to haves • Exposure to media, adtech, martech, or analytics platforms • Experience integrating third-party data APIs under commercial or compliance constraints • Past work as an early or founding engineer at a startup • Experience leading or mentoring other engineers, particularly in a distributed or cross-cultural setting • Comfort working across SEA with colleagues whose first language is not English Who this is not for • Engineers who want a narrowly scoped back-end or front-end role • People who need a large team and heavy process to do their best work • People who want to work only on the LLM layer without touching the rest of the stack

The Stack Our current stack includes AWS (hosting, UAT environment at uat.ungu-media.com) and Anthropic Claude as the base LLM. The front-end and back-end technology choices inherited from our development partner are stable but pragmatic; we are open to evolving them as you take ownership. You should be comfortable choosing the right tool for the job rather than religiously attached to any particular framework.

How We Work • Remote-first. We are open to candidates from anywhere in Malaysia. Expect regular video calls with the CEO (Singapore) and fractional CTO, with occasional travel to Singapore for planning sessions. • Ship fast, iterate. We prefer shipping, gathering feedback, and iterating over building comprehensive solutions upfront. • Direct and decisive. Decisions are made quickly, clearly, and in writing. If something is broken or wrong, we say so and fix it. • Growth path. You are the first engineering hire. For the first year the focus is hands-on ownership of the codebase and shipping. Beyond that, as we expand into new markets, the expected path is into technical leadership of a distributed team across SEA.

Compensation Salary - RM 100,000–140,000 pa salary, commensurate with experience and depth of full-stack ownership. Equity - Meaningful equity granted as employee stock options on a standard four-year vest with a one-year cliff. As the first engineering hire, the grant will reflect the founding nature of the role rather than a typical employee allocation. Engagement structure - 6 months’ probation period as an independent contractor (paid monthly in MYR, gross). Transition to full employment via an Employer of Record arrangement in Malaysia thereafter, subject to mutual fit. EOR employment includes full statutory benefits (EPF, SOCSO, EIS, annual leave, public holidays).

How to Apply Send a short note to [email protected] with: • A CV or LinkedIn profile • Links to two or three things you have shipped that you are proud of, ideally including something you built on top of an LLM • A few sentences on why this role, as opposed to a larger team at a larger company, is interesting to you

No cover letter required. We read every application.