What are the responsibilities and job description for the Founding Engineer position at Parent ProTech?
Parent ProTech is building the platform families, schools, and communities use to raise safe, smart digital citizens. We help parents, educators, and students navigate online safety with practical, expert-backed content, recommendations, and learning experiences.
We are hiring a Founding Engineer to own the technical direction of our platform and help us scale product development in a thoughtful, practical way. This is a highly hands-on role for someone who can balance architecture, execution, and day-to-day delivery—working closely with leadership to ship meaningful product improvements with technical discipline.
Our platform is primarily built in Ruby on Rails and Angular. We also work with contractors, so this role requires someone who can contribute directly in code and improve how work gets planned, reviewed, and shipped across a distributed development model.
What You’ll Own
- Own system architecture and technical design across the platform
- Write and ship production code on high-priority initiatives
- Review pull requests and raise the quality bar for engineering output
- Manage sprint planning and day-to-day coordination with contractors
- Drive improvements in code quality, reliability, and delivery speed
- Help prioritize technical debt, platform improvements, and new feature work
- Introduce AI-forward development practices and identify where AI can improve our product and internal workflows
- Partner with leadership to translate product and business priorities into technical execution plans
What We’re Looking For
- Strong full-stack engineering experience in production environments
- Proven ability to own technical architecture and make sound tradeoffs
- Comfortable being highly hands-on in the codebase
- Experience managing or coordinating contractor or outsourced engineering teams
- Strong judgment, communication, and product sense
- Able to create structure and process without adding unnecessary overhead
- Experience with Ruby on Rails and Angular (our primary stack)
Nice to Have
- Background in education, consumer SaaS, content platforms, or trust and safety products
- Experience improving or modernizing an existing codebase built over time by multiple contributors
- Familiarity with analytics, experimentation, and instrumentation
What Success Looks Like (First 3–6 Months)
- Build a clear understanding of the existing system, architecture, and technical risks
- Establish a pragmatic roadmap for architecture and platform improvements
- Improve engineering velocity and code quality in measurable ways
- Create more consistency in sprint execution, PR review, and contractor communications
- Ship meaningful product improvements with stronger technical discipline