Founding Software Engineer

Founding Software Engineer

Kodo | New York City

Four days per week in our NYC office

Annual base salary: USD 170,000–200,000, plus equity participation

Candidates must be based in the United States and authorized to work in the US without employer sponsorship. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.

Build whole products with AI

Kodo is the AI-native customer delight platform. We bring together customer data, research, rewards and engagement to help brands understand their customers and build lasting loyalty.

We’re looking for a product engineer who can take an idea from an open question to a complete product in customers’ hands. You’ll work directly with Luke Langford, founder of Userflux (userflux.co), which we recently acquired, on end-to-end product development at Kodo.

This role calls for a high degree of autonomy. You’ll help decide what to build, make the technical decisions and own delivery through launch and iteration. We expect heavy use of AI throughout that process so you can take on and deliver substantial products.

What you’ll own

• Take products from idea to production. Understand the customer problem, define a useful scope, build the experience and ship it. Own the work across the interface, backend, data and integrations.
• Make product decisions. Work directly with Luke to turn ambiguous needs into clear choices. Use customer feedback and evidence to decide what matters, what can wait and what needs to change.
• Use AI extensively to build. Make AI-assisted development central to how you explore, prototype, implement, test and debug. Develop workflows that help you deliver complete, substantial products quickly.
• Own the quality of what ships. Understand and review the code you deliver, including AI-generated code. Build appropriate tests, protect customer data and make deliberate decisions about security, reliability and maintainability.
• Follow through after launch. Monitor how your products work in practice, investigate problems and improve the experience based on real usage.
• Keep work moving independently. Break down unfamiliar problems, surface important trade-offs early and communicate clearly about progress, risks and decisions.

What you’ll bring

• Evidence that you can build and ship useful software end to end. We want to see what you’ve made, the decisions you owned and what happened after launch.
• Strong product judgment. You care about the customer’s experience, notice the details and can simplify a problem without losing what makes the solution valuable.
• The engineering range to work across a product and learn what’s needed. You can reason about architecture, data, APIs and user interfaces, and debug problems across them.
• A serious AI-assisted development practice. You use AI to take on larger pieces of work, know where it needs direction and verification, and remain accountable for the result.
• The ability to operate with little day-to-day direction. You’re comfortable turning incomplete information into a plan, asking useful questions and owning the outcome.
• Clear communication and a practical approach to balancing speed with quality.
• The ability to work from our NYC office four days per week.

Why this role

You’ll have direct ownership of meaningful product work and work closely with Luke on what Kodo builds next. The scope spans the full product lifecycle, with room to shape both the customer experience and how we use AI to build it.

How to apply

Apply with your LinkedIn profile or resume and links to products or projects you’ve built. Include a short note on one project you owned end to end: the problem, your contribution, how you used AI and what you learned after shipping.

Public links are useful where available, but please don’t share confidential code, customer data or information from a current or former employer.

We welcome candidates from all backgrounds who meet the role’s requirements.