Founding Engineer & Technical Lead

Remote (U.S.) | Fractional / Contract | Equity-Only to Start

We're building an AI-native software platform for childcare and early education, bringing enrollment and compliance, school operations, tuition and payments, and family communication into one connected product.

The product is built and working today. We've developed it closely with early design partners and are preparing to onboard our first paying customers.

We're now looking for a Founding Engineer & Technical Lead to become a hands-on technical owner of the platform as we move into production with real schools, families, sensitive data, and payments.

Compensation & Stage

We want to be transparent upfront:

This is currently an equity-only opportunity. We are not offering a cash salary or hourly compensation at this stage.

The company is founder-funded and pre-institutional financing. This role is intended for someone who is specifically interested in joining at the ground level, taking meaningful technical ownership, and participating in the value they help create.

The engagement will be fractional to start, with meaningful equity based on experience, commitment, scope of responsibility, and long-term involvement.

We intend to pursue outside financing as we reach our next customer and product milestones. As the company grows and capital becomes available, our intention is for the right person to have the opportunity to transition into a competitively compensated, long-term technical leadership role while retaining the ownership established early.

The Role

This is a hands-on engineering and technical ownership role.

You'll work directly with the founder, who built the product to date using an AI-native development workflow with tools including Claude Code and Cursor and will remain deeply involved in product development, customer feedback, experimentation, and rapid prototyping.

We want someone who sees that as a force multiplier.

The working relationship looks roughly like this:

Founder: product vision, customer insight, rapid prototyping, experimentation, and AI-assisted feature development.

You: production architecture, technical judgment, code review, testing, security, deployment, reliability, and production ownership.

Together: decide what ships, what needs improvement, what can wait, and how the platform evolves.

Your role is not to take product development away from the founder. It's to build the technical foundation and guardrails that allow us to move extremely quickly without putting customers or production systems at unnecessary risk.

What You'll Own

You'll have meaningful responsibility across the platform, including:

• Production architecture, reliability, security, deployment, monitoring, and incident response
• Development, staging, and production workflows that allow rapid experimentation without risking live customers or data
• Reviewing, hardening, testing, and productionizing founder- and AI-generated features
• PostgreSQL architecture, data integrity, Row-Level Security, tenant isolation, and safe production migrations
• Backend services, APIs, authentication, authorization, and permissions
• Stripe Connect and payment infrastructure as real customer money moves through the platform
• Webhooks, idempotency, reconciliation, failure handling, and background processes
• Testing, observability, alerting, logging, backups, and recovery
• Third-party integrations and managed infrastructure
• AI/LLM application architecture and safe tool execution
• Continued hands-on product development across the full stack
• Technical prioritization: knowing what must be fixed now, what can wait, and what shouldn't be built yet
• Documentation and systems that prevent either the founder or engineer from becoming a single point of failure

As we begin supporting real customers, production ownership matters. When a critical issue affects customers, payments, authentication, security, or data, we need someone who takes ownership and responds quickly.

Current Stack

The platform is built on a modern web and managed-infrastructure stack, including:

• TypeScript
• React
• Next.js / App Router
• PostgreSQL
• Supabase
• Stripe Connect
• Vercel
• LLM APIs and agent tooling
• Resend and other third-party services

We don't expect prior experience with every vendor in our stack. Strong fundamentals and judgment matter more than checking every technology box.

What We're Looking For

We're looking for a seasoned, hands-on engineer who has personally owned software in production.

Ideally, you've been the person who got paged when something broke, diagnosed the issue yourself, made the tradeoffs, fixed it, and improved the system afterward.

You should have strong experience with:

• TypeScript and modern React
• Next.js, ideally App Router
• PostgreSQL at meaningful depth
• Multi-tenant SaaS architecture
• Row-Level Security or comparable tenant-isolation architecture
• Authentication and authorization
• Safe database migrations against live customer data
• Production payment systems
• APIs, webhooks, and third-party integrations
• Serverless or cloud production environments
• Monitoring, debugging, deployment, and incident response
• Security fundamentals and handling sensitive customer data

This role skews somewhat backend/platform-heavy, but you should still be capable of shipping polished product functionality across the full stack.

We're more interested in what you've actually owned, shipped, and operated than impressive company names, titles, or credentials.

Particularly Valuable Experience

You do not need every item below, but these would make you especially interesting:

• Stripe Connect, marketplace, or multi-party payment systems
• Supabase in production, particularly PostgreSQL RLS
• Founding engineer or early technical employee at a startup that reached paying customers
• Personally owning production within a small engineering organization
• Sensitive or regulated data in education, healthcare, fintech, HR, insurance, or a similar environment
• Building import or migration systems for messy real-world customer data
• Production LLM features involving tool or function calling
• Taking over an existing codebase and improving it without reflexively rewriting it
• Executing a live database or environment migration with a real rollback plan

AI-Native Engineering

AI-assisted development is fundamental to how we work.

We actively use Claude Code, Cursor, and similar tools to increase development velocity, and we intend to remain a small, highly leveraged engineering organization.

We're looking for someone who has embraced this shift while bringing enough engineering depth to understand where AI-generated code can fail.

You should be comfortable using AI aggressively for exploration, implementation, testing, refactoring, and debugging while personally applying judgment to areas such as:

• Authorization and tenant isolation
• Database migrations and data integrity
• Payments and financial state
• Webhook ordering and idempotency
• Concurrency and failure handling
• Security and sensitive data
• Production reliability

We're not looking for someone who dismisses AI-assisted development.

We're also not looking for someone who blindly trusts whatever an agent generates.

We're looking for an excellent engineer who knows what to delegate, what to verify, and what matters most.

How We Work

Speed without recklessness.
Getting software into customers' hands matters. So does knowing when something isn't safe to ship.

Pragmatism over complexity.
We don't want infrastructure or abstraction simply because larger companies use it.

Risk-based technical debt.
Some technical debt threatens customers. Some can appropriately wait. Knowing the difference is part of the job.

Small-team leverage.
AI, APIs, managed infrastructure, and modern development tools allow a small number of exceptional people to accomplish dramatically more.

Ownership.
At this stage, there isn't another department to hand a problem to.

Product thinking.
Technology exists to solve customer problems. Strong opinions about the product are welcomed.

Location & Commitment

The role is remote within the United States.

The company is based in Santa Barbara, California. Being local is not required, but candidates in Santa Barbara, Ventura, greater Los Angeles, or elsewhere in Southern California who are open to occasional in-person collaboration are especially encouraged to apply.

We're looking for meaningful, consistent weekly involvement rather than occasional advisory availability, along with agreed responsiveness for critical production issues.

The exact ongoing commitment can be structured around the right person.

Where This Can Go

We're approaching our first paying customers, not starting from a slide deck.

The right person will have the opportunity to help take a founder-built product into production, shape its technical foundation, influence the product itself, establish the engineering culture, and eventually help build the engineering organization around it.

If the relationship works and the company progresses as we expect, this person could grow into a significant long-term technical leadership role.

We're looking for someone who wants to help own the outcome, not just contribute code.