Founding Product Engineer

***Complete the associated challenge to be considered by the hiring manager for this role***

## About Homemade

 Homemade is building the infrastructure layer for food decisions in America, starting in Seattle.

Founded by Joel Gamoran (chef, author, and TV host), Homemade reaches **20 million people per year** through the largest cooking class platform in America. The next product puts a chef in everyone's pocket: a text-first, recipe-driven guidance system that helps families turn the food they already have into meals, reducing waste, saving money, and improving health outcomes.

The core insight: people don't need more nutrition education. They need help in the moment they're deciding what to cook.

Homemade has active contracts with major healthcare systems and governments. The business model is B2B2C: government agencies, healthcare systems, employers, and sponsors pay for access, and the end user never pays. Revenue is non-dilutive and contract-based. This is no longer concept stage. The platform needs to perform at production grade: compliant, reliable, and built to scale.

## The Role

You will be the first full-time engineer at Homemade. There is no engineering team today. No GitHub repo. No CI/CD pipeline. You're building from zero, and that's the point.

You will work directly with Joel, translating product vision into a system that works in the real world for hospital patients, city agencies, and everyday families. Joel is a visual communicator who whiteboard-sketches ideas and prototypes in Claude, then hands you the baton to build. Expect 4 to 6 hours of face time daily (whiteboarding, debating, aligning), then you go heads-down and ship.

A fractional CTO with enterprise-scale build experience will provide architectural guidance and review your work on a regular cadence. You'll have a sounding board, but the code, the infrastructure, and the shipping cadence are yours.

This is not a role for someone who needs a roadmap handed to them. It is for a builder who can whiteboard in the morning and have a PR open by afternoon.

## What You'll Build

• A mobile-first web experience centered on recipe delivery, personalization, and ingredient substitution, optimized for low-end devices and fast load times (under 2 seconds)
• The SMS/messaging loop that reaches users 2 to 3x per week at the moment they're deciding what to cook, via Twilio or equivalent
• Claude/LLM integrations that power real-time recipe modification ("swap onion for something I have"), dietary constraint handling (gluten-free, low-sodium, allergy-safe), and personalized follow-ups that get smarter over time
• Serverless infrastructure (AWS Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB or equivalent) that scales without unnecessary cost or complexity
• A lightweight partner dashboard for the local government & hospital systems, tracking users reached, engagement, recipes completed, and estimated savings
• Data flows that handle institutional nutrition parameters (e.g., oncology-appropriate meal guidance from partner health systems) without touching HIPAA-protected data
• CI/CD, GitHub, code review processes, and engineering documentation from scratch. You're setting the technical foundation for everything that follows

## What We're Not Looking For

• Someone who wants to manage a team. There is no team yet. You're the team.
• Someone from a large company who needs process, clarity, and a defined role before they can execute. There is no process. You'll create it.
• An AI hobbyist. We need someone who has shipped AI-powered products, not someone who's excited about the concept.
• A remote worker. This role is in-person in Seattle Monday through Thursday. Non-negotiable.

## Visa Sponsorship

Homemade welcomes candidates on OPT/STEM OPT and candidates requiring H-1B transfer. New H-1B sponsorship is not available for this role at this time.

## Why This Role Matters

Homemade's mission is to empower people to cook one more meal at home per week. Every family that does saves about $600/year and reduces food waste. Multiply that by millions of families, and that's the scale of what you're building.

You're not joining a team. You're building one. The decisions you make in the first 90 days (architecture, tooling, engineering culture) will define the company's technical foundation for years. And the product you build will be deployed in partner hospitals, helping families whose children are going through treatment cook meals that are safe, affordable, and actually good.

This starts in Seattle. The goal is to become the infrastructure layer for food decisions in America.

Salary : $600