What are the responsibilities and job description for the Founding Engineer position at Averity?
A newly funded growth equity firm is building its first in-house technology platform and is looking for a Founding Engineer.
This is a true zero-to-one opportunity. There are no legacy systems, no predefined architecture, and no existing engineering team. You'll own the technical vision, make the foundational technology decisions, and build the platform that becomes the firm's competitive advantage.
The mission is ambitious: build an AI-powered investment sourcing platform that continuously discovers high-quality companies, surfaces the strongest opportunities, and gives investors an edge before everyone else.
We're looking for someone who has lived through building data-intensive products at an early-stage company—someone who has owned production systems, shipped customer-facing software, understands modern AI tooling, and wants to build a platform that becomes the technological backbone of an investment firm.
What You'll Build
You'll architect and develop a proprietary platform that:
- Collects signals from across the internet
- Identifies companies that match evolving investment theses
- Scores and prioritizes opportunities using data and AI
- Tracks company interactions, meetings, notes, and engagement history
- Automates manual investment workflows across the deal lifecycle
- Continuously becomes smarter as more proprietary data is captured
This isn't just another internal tool—it's a long-term strategic asset that will compound in value as the firm's proprietary data grows.
What You'll Do
- Architect and build the platform from day one
- Design scalable backend systems, data pipelines, and supporting infrastructure
- Build intuitive internal products and workflows that investors use every day
- Evaluate and define the technology stack across backend, frontend, AI, and data
- Leverage AI to automate research, sourcing, and investment workflows where it creates meaningful value
- Partner directly with investors to translate how they identify great companies into scalable software
- Remain deeply hands-on while setting the long-term technical direction
What We're Looking For
- Experience building and shipping complex software products from the ground up
- Strong backend engineering skills in Python or comparable languages (Go, Java, C , etc.)
- Experience designing scalable data infrastructure, modern data pipelines, and production-grade systems
- Meaningful ownership of production data pipelines and ML systems—not just building them, but operating and evolving them at scale
- Ideally, you've been an early engineer at a data-centric company where the product itself was the data, giving you experience across both application development and data infrastructure
- Real-world experience integrating AI into production products, with strong judgment around where AI adds value—and where it doesn't
- Proven ability to build polished, user-facing applications—not just backend services—with strong product instincts and attention to user experience
- Strong system design and architectural thinking with the ability to connect the entire stack, from infrastructure through application
- Experience owning systems end-to-end in small, high-trust engineering teams
- Comfortable making high-conviction technical decisions with limited structure
- High ownership, low ego, and excellent written communication skills
- Excited by AI, automation, and data-intensive products
- Experience in investing, financial services, or deal sourcing is a plus, but not required.
Why This Opportunity
- True founding engineer ownership from day one
- Complete technical autonomy over a greenfield platform
- Direct partnership with investors and firm leadership
- Build technology that directly influences investment decisions
- Opportunity to grow into Head of Engineering as the company scales
- Long-term alignment through fund economics and meaningful ownership
Compensation & Structure
- Competitive base salary
- Annual bonus
- Fund-level economics / carry participation
- Hybrid role in the Greater NYC area (3 days onsite)