Lead Engineer

We build the CRM that nonprofits, workforce agencies and correctional facilities use to run their programs, and the Untapped app, an AI social worker for the people they serve. You would be our second full-time engineer and the first to own the architecture. We do not plan to hire a technical leader above you, and the path from here runs to CTO.

At a glance
Salary: $100,000 starting, about $130,000 planned at seed. Equity: none, salary only. Benefits: health insurance and PTO. Location: St. Louis preferred (we are opening an office there), and remote within the US is welcome, except California. Team: two engineers plus AI agents.

What we do
Untapped is a two-sided platform. On one side is a CRM that caseworkers use to run their programs, from intake and referrals to job placement, grant reporting and workflow automation. On the other is the Untapped app, our AI social worker, which the people those organizations serve use to find work, build a resume, track their goals and stay connected to their caseworker.

Our customers include correctional facilities, reentry and workforce development organizations, community nonprofits, and domestic violence programs. Our customers use us to prove outcomes to funders, so our reporting has to be right. When a number is wrong, a grant report is wrong.

The direction is bigger than CRM. Case management, grant funding, outcomes reporting and program operations belong in one system for this sector, and nobody has built it properly.

Where we are
We raised a pre-seed round a couple of years ago and are approaching our seed round. We have paying customers, usage and revenue, and we are growing at a good pace. We are small enough that you would feel the effect of everything you ship.

We build heavily with AI. Alongside our engineer, we run AI agents set up as architecture specialists. A large share of this codebase was written by AI agents working under human direction, with humans reviewing and merging. That gives the codebase broad feature coverage, and also seams where the same idea was implemented more than once. We would rather show you the state of the code now than have you find out in month two.

What you would walk into
API: C# / .NET, EF Core, SQL Server (about 257k lines, 110 controllers, 486 migrations). Clients: Expo, React, React Native, react-native-web (about 724k lines), with one build serving the CRM on the web and the mobile app. Infra: AWS (Elastic Beanstalk, CloudFront, S3, RDS, SES), with staging and then a manual release to production. Tests: xUnit and Jest, with 3,205 backend tests, green.

What still needs work: framework and dependency upgrades on a planned path, a backlog of TypeScript errors to burn down (CI already blocks it from growing), legacy code still to be retired, and a release process that needs hardening. None of this is urgent. All of it is why we are hiring someone to own the architecture.

The role
You own the product architecture: the CRM, the app, the data model, the reporting engine, and how they fit together. You would join our full-time engineer, who owns platform, infrastructure and our SOC 2 work, and you would direct the AI agents we have set up as architecture specialists. You both report to the CEO, and neither of you manages the other. You are hands-on every day, and you decide what we build on.

First six months
Ship features with us (notifications and staff mentions, reporting improvements, UI work). Find duplicated business rules and collapse each into one implementation, with tests that fail when someone forks them again. Give us a staged modernization plan with real sequencing. Make the release process trustworthy, with zero-downtime migrations. Set the review bar for everything merged here, whether a person or an AI agent wrote it.

Where this role goes
We are hiring the person we expect to become our technical leader. The path we intend is Lead Engineer, then Principal Engineer, then VP of Technology, then CTO, and we plan to raise your salary with each step and with each funding round.

What we need you to be strong at
One rule, one place. Systems that fail loudly. Tests that can fail. Multi-tenant safety as a reflex, since much of our data is sensitive information about vulnerable people. Migrations you would run on a Friday. Reading a large unfamiliar codebase fast. Directing and reviewing AI-written code (machine-learning experience is not required).

What would make you a strong fit
Senior or staff-level experience shipping and owning production systems end to end. Depth in a typed backend language and a modern typed frontend (ours are C#/.NET and TypeScript/React Native; adjacent experience is fine if the fundamentals are strong). You have carried a system through a migration or re-architecture without stopping delivery. You are comfortable owning AWS infrastructure. You have experience with relational data modeling, including customer-configurable custom fields. You want the responsibility. Experience in nonprofit, workforce development, corrections, reentry or government technology is a plus.

Compensation and terms
$100,000 base salary, full-time. St. Louis is preferred, and we are opening an office there as we scale through the Midwest. Remote within the US is also welcome (excluding California). About $130,000 planned once our seed round closes, with further increases at each funding round after that. Benefits: health insurance and paid time off. No equity; this is a salary-only role. $100k is below what this role pays at a funded startup, and the planned increases are how we narrow that gap. If the number is the dealbreaker, we would rather know early.

How to apply
Include a short note about a system you owned: what was broken when you arrived, and what you changed. Links to code we can read are welcome. Also tell us which item under "What still needs work" you would tackle first, and why.

Untapped Solutions is an equal opportunity employer. We consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records, in line with fair-chance hiring laws.