Founding Senior Full Stack Engineer

The role

You'll be Duler's first full-time engineering hire — Founding Senior Full Stack Engineer — partnering directly with the founders to take our product from pre-pilot to production, and then scaling the engineering org behind it.

This is a solo role to start. You'll inherit a working MVP built to a strong foundation and own the trajectory from there: ship with our first design partners, stabilize, then hire and lead the team that carries us to the next stage. Your role grows with the company; the path is yours to create.

About Duler

With the Founder of Lodgistics (successfully acquired in 2024), we're building a workforce management platform for the hospitality industry — the software that hotel teams use to staff their property. The domain is deeper than it looks: recurring shift patterns, draft-and-publish snapshots with audit trails, occupancy-driven labor quotas, multi-property organizations, and the permission graph that goes with it. This is what we can share here, but know the roadmap is very long, disruptive, and exciting!

We're early-stage and pre-pilot, with design partners lined up. The MVP is built and working on staging. The next chapter is yours to build.

What you'll do

As a startup, the responsibilities will shift and grow over time as will the position. Here is what to expect in the first year. 

• Months 0–3 — own the stack, ship with design partners, stabilize. We will focus on getting you up to speed with our Pilot platform, working with third party engineers to become an expert on our current code base. While ~80% of your time will be hands-on engineering, you will also work with the founders on establishing and adapting roadmaps and new sprints. You will also work with real clients to understand the end user experience beyond the platform to help build the right tools for the right people.

• Months 3–9 — hire, delegate, set the bar. As we continue to grow our features and client base, we will look to expand the team supporting you. This will begin with Mobile, Front End, and Back End Engineers, allowing you to focus more on reviewing and shipping code to production.

• Months 9 — strategy and scale. We will look to round out the team by expanding it to fill Engineering gaps, allowing you to continue to shift focus on reviewing code to ship along with leading the roadmap execution, vendor and security posture, and partner with founders to set the direction of the product as we expand features.

You'll thrive if

• You’ve taken a product from zero to paying customers, identifying and prioritizing key features that support the sales process 
• You are passionate about coding and creating products that feel native to use
• You can adapt your project plans to account for changing user scenarios, building the product where the user needs will land and doing so as efficiently as possible
• You're happy in the ambiguity of pre-PMF work and move without a template
• You have strong opinions about code, product, and process — held loosely
• You've hired and mentored engineers, and a few of them still keep in touch
• You care about the craft and the business equally

This is not for you if

• You need a large existing team to be effective
• You prefer deep specialization over end-to-end ownership
• You'd rather optimize an existing system than decide what to build next
• You are immediately looking to be above the day-to-day coding 
• Are unable to adapt and rethink the product as we receive feedback from clients. 
• Rely exclusively on AI tools to write and debug code or complete tasks (AI can be used but you must know how to work without it)

Must-have

Cross-cutting

• 0→1 SaaS experience — link to a production system you took from zero to paying customers
• Hired and mentored engineers directly (names who still keep in touch is a bonus)
• B2B SaaS background
• B2C SaaS is a plus

Backend

• Solid experience in designing and building APIs
• Proficiency in Ruby (3.x), Rails (8.x)
• Strong skills in PostgreSQL, Redis
• Experience in Git, Docker
• Familiarity with our Rails ecosystem (Solid Queue, Devise, Action Policy, RSpec, Kamal)

Frontend

• Proficiency in TypeScript (strict mode)
• Strong skills in form-heavy interfaces (react-hook-form Zod or similar), atomic state management (Nanostores or similar), OpenAPI-first client generation
• Experience with Vite, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/Radix UI primitives, modern testing (Vitest, Playwright, MSW)

You'll inherit this stack. The decision to keep, extend, or replace any part of it is yours to make as Lead.

Nice to have

• Solid experience building complex product UIs with React (19)
• Domain background in hospitality, workforce management, scheduling, or field-service software
• OpenAPI-first / contract-first API design experience
• Design sensibility and comfort partnering closely with designers

Compensation

• Base salary: $150K—$180K USD
• Equity: 1%—2%
• Benefits: Health/Dental, PTO

Logistics

• Location: Ideally Onsite in Raleigh,NC / Hybrid
• Timezone: Eastern
• Visa sponsorship: No
• Reporting line: reports to the founder; partners on technical and product direction

How we hire

1. Intro call with the founder (30 min)
2. Technical deep-dive — walk us through a system you built end-to-end (60 min)
3. Paid take-home or pairing session on a realistic problem (~4 hours)
4. Conversation with a Technical Advisor / Development partner (60 min)
5. Reference checks offer

We aim to move from the first conversation to offer in 2–3 weeks.

How to apply

We read every application. If the role is close but not an exact fit, tell us why you're writing anyway.