Senior Full-Stack Engineer (Founding Engineer)

Compensation: $80k – $90k • No equity

A stealth startup hiring its first two engineers to build a new consumer web platform from scratch, alongside the founding team. You'll own major parts of the system end to end and set the technical patterns the rest of the team builds within.

This is a founding-engineer role: you ship code daily and set the standards, on a greenfield codebase.

Stack: Node.js + TypeScript (NestJS) on the backend, React + Next.js on the frontend, PostgreSQL, Redis, GCP. AI-assisted (agentic) development with Claude Code or equivalent is part of how we work.

How we work: Small team, high ownership, short cycles. Remote within European timezones (±2h CET). English working language. Trunk-based development, PR reviews, CI on every merge. Everyone touches production. We optimise for shipping a thin, correct slice over building horizontal platforms.

Location & work authorization: fully remote within European or GCC timezones. You must already be authorized to work in your country of residence. We are not sponsoring visas at this stage.

What you'll do

• Build the shared platform core end to end: accounts and multi-tenancy, the core data model, search, media, messaging, and the public web app
• Own whole features from data model to UI, making pragmatic, reversible-first architecture decisions as you go
• Set the conventions, patterns, and quality bar the later hires build within
• Move fast on a greenfield codebase without painting us into corners

Must-haves

• 5+ years full-stack, strong in both Node/TypeScript backend and React/Next.js frontend
• Has built and shipped complex web applications end to end, ideally from an early or greenfield stage
• Strong PostgreSQL and API design; comfortable owning both the data model and the UI
• Git fluency and daily work in a CI/CD environment (branching, rebasing, meaningful history, PR-based workflow)
• Fluent with AI coding tools (Claude Code or equivalent) as part of daily work, and reviews the output to a high bar
• Ownership beyond the tickets: cares about the product, the customer experience, and the business outcome, and thinks ahead about what the platform will need without overbuilding what it needs now
• Works well in a small team: communicates early, shares context, gives and takes code review, takes broad ownership
• Comfortable with ambiguity and breadth: happy owning a slice and figuring it out rather than waiting for a spec
• Authorized to work in your country of residence (we are not sponsoring visas at this stage)

Nice-to-haves

• High-traffic consumer product experience
• Search, geo, media pipelines, or third-party data integration at volume
• Early-stage or founding-engineer experience