Founding Engineer (Senior)

TL;DR

• We're an AI startup democratizing access to government contracts by making it easier for small businesses to find and respond to soul-crushingly complex RFPs and paperwork.
• We just raised $3m (April 2024).
• We're looking for a founding engineer to join our 4-person team. Long hours at the keyboard, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return unknown. Honor, recognition, and enormous riches in case of success.

The Elevator Pitch

Last year, over $650Bn of government contracts were awarded to small businesses. Most of these contracts were awarded via bureaucratic Request For Proposal (RFP) processes where solicitations are publicly posted and vendors submit bids and proposal packets.

Finding and responding to these arcane RFPs is time-intensive, confusing, and error-prone. 90K distinct government entities publish RFPs across thousands of clunky websites. RFP instructions are complex and lengthy. Minor mistakes in proposals can result in disqualification. Assembling proposal packets can take hours, days, or weeks.

As one of our customers put it, "it's the worst f--ing thing ever."

So we're building an AI-powered platform to make it 10x easier to discover, decipher, and win RFPs. Customers seem to love what we've built so far, but we are only in the earliest innings...that's where you come in...

About the Role

We are looking for a hungry, talented full-stack engineer to join our team and collaborate closely with our CTO and rest of the founding team--while having room to work autonomously and build creatively.

Your Role / Responsibilities

• Obsess on developing intuitive, high-performing backend applications in Python/Django and frontend applications in JavaScript.
• Building and maintaining a scalable system that can ingest thousands of lengthy government contracts, handle sensitive customer information, and use LLMs to accelerate the achievement of business outcomes for our customers.
• Create and drive best practices in teams (including peer reviews & building for testability.)
• Embrace new AI tools (LLMs, agents) to accelerate BreezeRFP's pace of product development
• Working with sales and product to better understand our customers' problems, and working collaboratively with them to create clever solutions to achieve business outcomes
• Create and specify architectural and technical parameters.
• Collaborating closely with the CEO, President, and CTO
• Embracing the start-up lifestyle, including not only the glamorous parts (building meaningful products by yourself), but also the less sexy elements of the job (promptly responding to customer support tickets, quickly triaging unforeseen issues, etc.)

Requirements

While we are open minded about the background of for this hire, we envision the ideal candidate for this role will have a proven track record along many of the following dimensions:

• At least 5 years of Python experience
• At least 5 years of JavaScript experience
• At least 7 years of web app development experience, including a clear understanding of the RESTful API architecture
• Extensive experience building complex applications using Django and DRF
• Demonstrated passion for working with Large Language Models
• A good understanding of Computer Science fundamentals
• Ability to clearly explain technical concepts to non-technical team members
• Experience translating product ideas from 0 to 1, with measurable commercial outcomes as a result
• Ability to break down product vision into a prioritized list of discrete, achievable engineering milestones.
• Familiarity with working in an early-stage startup environment
• Some DevOps skills; able to get hands dirty on Linux, AWS, Docker, CI pipelines, etc.
• Understanding of source control (Git) and build workflows and collaboration
• Views a culture of hard work as a feature, not a bug
• A sense of humor

Our ideal candidate will be comfortable working across our current tech stack:

• Python/Django
• JavaScript/Vue.js (React experience is acceptable too!)
• Postgres/Relational DB
• OpenAI/LangChain

If you’re interested in learning more about this role, apply and we’re happy to tell you more about what we’re building, and what this role will entail. Even if you don't have all of the exact qualifications of what we've listed here, if you understand the vibe of what we're looking for in this role, please reach out! We care more about hustle, aptitude, and ambition than we do about pedigree or years of work experience.