Demo

Founding Software Engineer

Career Mentors, LLC
NEW YORK, NY Full Time
POSTED ON 3/18/2026
AVAILABLE BEFORE 5/17/2026

Founding Software Engineer

Company Our Client (YC F24) builds deployment infrastructure that lets B2B SaaS & AI companies ship mission-critical software directly into customer clouds (AWS/GCP/Azure) or on-prem — in minutes, not months. Secure BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) with sanitized telemetry, control-plane orchestration, reliable updates, and observability built for data-sovereign industries like healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and defense-adjacent verticals.

The Role Founding Software Engineer (full-time, in-person NYC) $160K–$220K base 0.5–2% equity

Join as an early engineer (~#3) on a tiny, high-velocity team with founders from Palantir, Vercel, Capital One. Own end-to-end: design & ship distributed systems orchestrating deployments across hundreds of heterogeneous customer environments. Build from first principles — we're creating new tooling, not configuring existing stacks.

What You'll Own

  • Core orchestration: reliable agents/controllers in customer K8s clusters for installs, updates, rollbacks, config sync

  • Secure telemetry pipelines: sanitized logs/metrics/alerts back to the control plane without exposing customer data

  • Control plane services APIs: multi-tenant reliability, performance scaling, zero-downtime across clouds

  • Production hardening: debug chaos in real enterprise envs (compliance, security, air-gaps)

  • Shape architecture, roadmap, and engineering culture — direct founder access



Must-Have Builder Profile

  • 3 years shipping production systems (ideally 1 at high-growth/VC-backed startup)

  • Hands-on Kubernetes cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure): built/scaled clusters, not just applied YAML

  • Strong Go (Golang): concurrent systems, gRPC, reliable services

  • Full-stack ownership: backend APIs/services TypeScript/React comfort

  • True 0→1: designed, built, shipped, debugged, iterated on infra tooling or dev platforms

  • High iteration velocity: ship fast, user feedback loops, pragmatic tradeoffs

Nice-to-Haves (big accelerators)

  • Built devtools/infra products (deployment platforms, observability agents, orchestration layers)

  • Deep Helm/Docker IaC (Terraform/Pulumi)

  • Observability: Prometheus/Grafana/Loki

  • CI/CD integrations (GitHub Actions etc.)

  • Postgres/S3 distributed debugging at scale

Life @ Our Client

  • Fully in-person (5 days/week) NYC — we build serious infra together

  • YC-backed seed with top investors and real traction (customers deploying now)

  • Unlimited PTO, full medical/dental/vision, meals, professional stipend, retreats

  • Ground-floor equity in exploding regulated SaaS/AI space

No visa sponsorship. US citizens / authorized only.

If you've shipped real deployment/orchestration tooling (Render/Vercel/Railway-style but for enterprise BYOC), thrive in distributed systems complexity, and crave massive ownership at seed — apply now.

DM me or email olga@toptechtalent.com with "Founding Engineer – Our Client" resume. Referrals prioritized.

Equal Employment Opportunity

TopTechTalent.ai believes that all persons are entitled to equal employment opportunities. TopTechTalent.ai recruits, hires, trains, promotes, disciplines and provides other conditions of employment without regard to a person's race, color, ethnicity, religion, gender, gender identity, or expression, age, national origin, citizenship status, disability, veteran's status, sexual orientation, marital status or other classifications protected under law or Company policy. This includes providing reasonable accommodation for team members' disabilities or religious beliefs and practices.

The government requires TopTechTalent.ai to maintain information on those who seek employment with the company, including their race and sex. Accordingly, to help us comply with this requirement, we encourage you to provide us with the following self-identification information. However, submission of this information is voluntary and refusal to provide it will not affect your opportunity for employment or terms and conditions of employment, if hired. If you do submit this information, it will be kept confidential and will be used in the compilation of data for reporting requirements.

🚫 Third-party recruiters, please do not reach out for this role.

Salary : $190,000 - $250,000

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