What are the responsibilities and job description for the Software Engineer position at Ploy?
About Ploy
Ploy is building an AI-native growth engine for modern marketing teams — combining high-leverage product experiences with reliable, scalable systems.
We’re a small, fast-moving team shipping new product surfaces weekly and hardening them for real production traffic. If you enjoy building end-to-end products, sweating details, and scaling what you ship, you’ll fit in well.
The role
As a Founding Engineer, you’ll work across the stack to build core product experiences and the systems behind them. You’ll partner closely with product and design, own projects from idea → shipped → scaled, and help shape the engineering culture and technical direction as we grow.
What You’ll Do
Must-haves
Ploy is building an AI-native growth engine for modern marketing teams — combining high-leverage product experiences with reliable, scalable systems.
We’re a small, fast-moving team shipping new product surfaces weekly and hardening them for real production traffic. If you enjoy building end-to-end products, sweating details, and scaling what you ship, you’ll fit in well.
The role
As a Founding Engineer, you’ll work across the stack to build core product experiences and the systems behind them. You’ll partner closely with product and design, own projects from idea → shipped → scaled, and help shape the engineering culture and technical direction as we grow.
What You’ll Do
- Build 0→1 product features end-to-end: discovery, technical design, implementation, launch, and iteration.
- Use the latest AI tools every day — build with them, push their limits, and learn alongside teammates doing the same.
- Ship across the stack (web app, backend services, data, infrastructure) with a bias toward simple, durable systems.
- Build product experiences with strong UX quality: interaction design, performance, and polish.
- Design and operate systems that scale: reliability, observability, capacity planning, cost/performance trade-offs.
- Improve our engineering foundations: architecture, tooling, CI, testing, release processes, and on-call hygiene.
- Collaborate tightly with founders and teammates, turning ambiguous problems into crisp execution.
Must-haves
- Strong track record building and shipping 0→1 products (startup, new product line, or major greenfield initiative).
- Comfortable as a true full-stack engineer (front-end backend), and willing to go wherever the work is.
- Strong product sense: you can reason about user workflows, trade-offs, and “what matters” without needing perfect specs.
- Design intuition: you care about craft, and you can implement clean UI with attention to detail.
- Systems mindset: you enjoy making software fast, reliable, and maintainable as usage grows.
- Experience scaling products and systems through inflection points (10× traffic, new customer segments, new pricing/billing complexity).
- Experience with AI-powered products (LLMs, agentic systems, evaluation/observability, prompt/tooling pipelines).
- Prior experience as an early engineer or founder in a high-ownership environment.
- Experience in the web and marketing space
- Small teams, high ownership, fast iteration.
- Engineers own product: you’ll partner directly with design and founders, and have real agency over what we build and why.
- Pragmatic engineering: ship quickly, then harden with the right abstractions.
- We value clear thinking, taste, and accountability over ceremony.