Founding Full-Stack Engineer

*COMPENSATION — READ THIS FIRST *

*Before launch and seed round (approx. months 4–6): equity-only. A founding-team equity grant negotiable based on experience, scope, and contribution. Standard vest and cliff. *

After launch and seed round: competitive base salary in the $190k–$280k range, ongoing equity participation through refresh grants, and other benefits.

Why we lead with this: we value your and our time. We are looking for people who want to make their mark. Astoria is building the most ambitious product in the category. The pre-launch and pre-seed round phase is founder-mode: small team, high intensity, outsized equity. This role is for someone who sees the equity as the primary upside — not a supplement — because they believe what we're building will define the category.

*The 90-Second Version *

We are in stealth and will help you with your diligence. Astoria AI is building an agentic runtime for human potential. Multiple specialized AI agents serve candidates and companies across the entire hiring and talent lifecycle: career strategy, networking intelligence, verified matching, compliance-native hiring, onboarding, engagement, retention, and workforce planning.

We are attacking a market that is structurally broken in ways that damage real people. 44% of resumes contain fabrications. ATS keyword filters reject 88% of qualified candidates. 27% of posted jobs are ghost jobs. Meanwhile the regulatory wave — Mobley v. Workday, the EU AI Act, FCRA lawsuits against Eightfold — is forcing every enterprise buyer to ask whether their hiring AI creates legal risk or eliminates it.

Nobody has fixed this. The incumbents can't, because their business models depend on the broken parts. That is the opening.

This is primarily a senior full-stack SaaS engineering role, not an AI research role. You do not need to be an AI engineer. Familiarity with LLM-powered product features is helpful, but we care first about strong product engineering: clean frontend architecture, reliable APIs, secure data flows, and the ability to ship real software end to end.

*A NOTE ON WHY THIS ROLE IS MORE INTERESTING THAN IT SOUNDS *

"Full-stack engineer at a startup" is the most common job posting on the internet. Here is what is actually different about this one.

You are not building CRUD screens on top of a database. You are building the interface layer for autonomous agents — which is an unsolved design problem. When an agent makes a recommendation about someone's career, how much of its reasoning do you show? How does a user correct it? What does confidence look like in a UI? When does the system hand off to a human, and how does that feel?

Nobody has good answers yet. The patterns for this do not exist. You would be inventing them, in production, for real users making real decisions about their working lives.

*What You'll Own *

• Build high-quality SaaS product features across frontend, backend, and data layers.
• Lead development of React/TypeScript user interfaces, including component architecture, state management, responsive layouts, and complex workflow screens.
• Design and implement backend services, APIs, database schemas, authentication, permissions, and integration workflows.
• Build product systems such as dashboards, notifications, workflow automation, background jobs, and data-heavy user experiences.
• Work with PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or similar databases to design reliable, secure, and maintainable data models.
• Build and maintain secure APIs using Node.js, Python/FastAPI, or similar backend technologies.
• Contribute to deployment and production infrastructure using serverless or cloud platforms such as Vercel, AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, or similar.
• Implement queue-based or event-driven workflows using tools such as Redis, RabbitMQ, Azure Service Bus, or similar technologies when needed.
• Use AI coding tools pragmatically to move faster while keeping code reviewed, maintainable, and tested.
• Collaborate on AI-powered product features as part of the user experience, without losing focus on software quality and product reliability.
• Improve developer experience, CI/CD, testing, monitoring, and operational reliability as the product matures.

*What You Bring *

• 6+ years of professional experience building production web applications.
• Strong experience with React, TypeScript, modern frontend architecture, component design, state management, and frontend performance.
• Experience building SaaS products, workflow tools, dashboards, marketplaces, internal platforms, or B2B applications.
• Strong backend experience with Node.js, Python/FastAPI, or similar technologies.
• Experience designing APIs, working with relational or document databases, and implementing secure authentication/authorization flows.
• Practical experience with cloud deployment, serverless architecture, or modern hosting platforms.
• Ability to own a feature from product discussion through implementation, release, and iteration.
• Strong engineering judgment: you know when to move fast, when to simplify, and when to invest in structure.
• Product sense: you care how features feel to users, not just whether they technically work.
• Clear written communication and comfort working in a small remote team.
• Comfort with ambiguity and ownership in an early-stage startup environment.

*Nice to have *

• Experience with queue-based workflows, background jobs, event-driven systems, real-time features, or notification systems.
• Experience with payment integrations such as Stripe.
• Experience with design systems, Tailwind CSS, data-heavy UIs, or complex workflow automation products.
• Familiarity with LLM APIs, AI-powered product features, RAG, agents, or evaluation workflows.
• Prior startup, founding engineer, or small-team product engineering experience.
• Portfolio, GitHub, shipped product, internal tool, or side project that shows end-to-end product building ability.

THIS IS THE RIGHT ROLE FOR YOU IF…

• You have taste and you are tired of shipping ugly software. You have opinions about interaction design and nobody has let you use them.
• You are comfortable with ambiguity — genuinely, not as an interview answer. Some weeks you will decide what to build as well as how to build it.
• You are ambitious about outcome, not title. Founding Engineer today. Whatever you earn later — Staff, Principal, VP Engineering — is yours to take.
• You want to be the reason a product feels good. At a big company you are one of two hundred people affecting the experience. Here you are the one.
• You can carry the equity-only period. Financially and psychologically. Six months is a long time to build on conviction.

IT IS THE WRONG ROLE IF…

• You want work-life balance right now. Later, yes. In the pre-launch phase, no. We would rather say that plainly than have you discover it in month two.
• You are optimizing for total cash compensation over the next 18 months. A senior role at a funded company will pay you more, sooner, with less risk. That is a completely rational choice.
• You prefer deep specialization in one layer of the stack. You will move between React, APIs, data models, and infrastructure constantly.