First Engineer: Own the Full Stack — Remote (EU/US)

Hebbian BV; Antwerpen; Hybride; EUR 72 540 - 122 760; Plein temps

Avantages offerts par ce poste

Equity options

Remote-friendly (EU/US)

Office perks & team lunches

Résumé du poste

Hebbian Vault is building a memory layer for companies, turning dispersed knowledge into a living brain that learns and scales with use. The mission-driven team seeks a first engineer to own the entire technical surface, from server-side to UI, with equity and a share of the early-stage journey.

You will work closely with the founder as a hands-on partner on product and architecture, shipping a secure, scalable platform and shaping the engineering culture from day one.

Qualifications

• Shipped and operated real production systems.
• Comfortable across the stack: data, backend, and frontend.
• Think in terms of isolation, correctness, and scale.
• Own outcomes with ownership and equity goals.
• Deep technical interest in infra, brain layers, and AI.
• Hands-on with AI and scalable architectures.

Responsabilités

• Own the entire technical surface: backend, frontend, data, the typed graph and infra.
• Collaborate with the founder to drive product direction while owning the technical surface.
• Harden the platform for reliability and sellable-grade quality.
• Remove single points of failure by distributing responsibilities across the stack.
• Develop the self-serve integration path and grow the connectors library.
• Own the security surface: RLS, tenant isolation, access boundaries.

Connaissances

Full-stack

DevOps

Security

AI integration

System design

Outils

Kubernetes

Python/Go/TS

OpenAI tools

Description du poste

Hire #1. Own the entire technical surface: server-side, UI, data, the typed graph and salience layer, infra and security, and build the product shoulder-to-shoulder with the founder, who stays on as CPO.

Work directly with the founder; CET/CEST overlap. Remote works from the EU or US only, we can only consider candidates based in the EU or the US.

Hebbian is building the memory layer for SMEs: a living, Hebbian-learning knowledge graph that turns a company's scattered knowledge (and each employee's) into a brain that holds what the company knows, governs what every role is allowed to see, and powers AI that actually knows the business.

Our mission is to give every company and every person a brain that holds what the work produces: memory captured from work instead of being lost to it, and that makes the AI built on top of it actually know the business and the people in it. It is in production today, built by a solo founder working with AI agents on one shared memory; the people we hire now are the first humans alongside the founder: equity-heavy, high-ownership, no bureaucracy.

In the near term, Hebbian is building toward a memory layer for companies and their people: company knowledge that survives turnover and a portable professional memory for each employee, powering AI that knows the business. The longer bet, over the next ten to fifteen years, is a world where every company and every person has memory that compounds with use.

What you'll do

• Own the whole stack, you do it all: server-side, client-side UI, data, the typed graph and salience layer, infra, security and DevOps. This is a full-stack-everything seat, not a specialized slice.
• Build the product shoulder-to-shoulder with the founder/CPO: the founder owns product direction and stays hands-on on the product day to day, while you own the technical surface. You build it together.
• Harden the platform to sellable-grade: performance, reliability, and the rough edges that stand between a working product and one you can sell with confidence.
• Retire the technical single point of failure: today the whole stack rests on the founder. You take the technical surface off the founder's plate, freeing the founder to stay on as CPO, focused on product, not stepping away from it.
• Build Value Loop 2: the self-serve path from connecting a tool to a working brain, and grow the integrations library behind it.
• Own the security surface: RLS, tenant isolation, and the access boundaries that let a company and its people share one memory safely.

What you'll own

• The entire technical surface: backend, frontend, data, the typed graph and salience layer, infra, security and DevOps. End to end, all of it.
• Value Loop 2 (self-serve connect → brain) end to end.
• The integrations library and the framework new connectors plug into.
• The security / RLS / tenant-isolation surface.
• Engineering culture: you set it, as the first engineer.

About you

• You've shipped and operated real production systems, not just prototypes.
• Comfortable across the stack: data, backend, and enough frontend to be dangerous.
• You think in terms of isolation, correctness, and what breaks at scale.
• You want ownership and equity over a big title and a big team.
• Deep technical interest in what we actually build: scaling infra and production, but also truly understanding the layers of the brain (the typed knowledge graph and the learned-relevance layer) and wanting your hands in all of it.
• Advanced, hands-on with AI: you build AI-augmented every day and treat 10x–100x leverage as the baseline.
• Genuinely excited by the idea of digital brains for companies and the people in them, caring about the mission, not just the stack.
• A real fit with how we work (see "How we work"), our values are how we choose teammates, not wall art.

The deal

Cash

up to €6,500/month gross (payroll), or up to ~€11,000/month via your own management company

Equity

1.5–3% (4-year vest, 1-year cliff), more equity, less cash; 1.5% takes the full listed wage

Structure

Your call on both the split and the engagement: at 1.5% equity you take the full listed cash, and you can dial equity up toward 3% for less cash. Belgian payroll up to €6,500/mo gross, or invoice up to ~€11,000/mo via your own management company, same cost to us (we'd otherwise carry employer charges on top of gross), and you optimize your own tax.

• You are hire #1.
• Work directly with the founder and the AI agents that run on the same shared memory.
• Office-first and genuinely connected. We really believe in 996 (the founder runs 997; we'd ask you to run 996) and in being in the room together, in a living-room-style office that's to follow soon. Live too far? We're open to remote (within the EU or US) and will set you up in a "digital living-room office" to recreate that connectedness, it takes intent, but it can absolutely be done.
• We plan to move to San Francisco around when the pre-seed lands (or at the seed round). Belgium-based and remote-friendly across the EU and US until then.
• A 49" Samsung G9: real estate matters when you run multi-terminal workloads side by side, we get it.
• Into open-model infra? We're open to exploring building our own, think an in-house NVIDIA GPU rack that scales with cards, to self-host open LLMs. If that's your kind of fun, there's room to build it.
• Codex + Claude at the highest tier, and plenty of budget for AI, tools, whatever you need to 10x and 100x yourself.
• Snacks and a JURA coffee machine at the office, après-5pm apéro (drinks & bites), nice team lunches, and the occasional team dinner and activity together. Our founder is a French-trained chef who loves to cook for the team and host proper gatherings.
• A company iPhone and mobile plan, the number's on us.
• Vacation: if your first question is "how many days?", this role probably isn't for you (said with a wink, but only half-joking). That said, we genuinely believe in taking the ~20 legally-obliged days: 10 official Belgian public holidays + 2 weeks off (a week in summer, a week over Christmas), adjustable to your own holidays, location and religion.
• 20% of the company goes to its staff over time, because we believe in sharing.

We hire for three Gs: growth, grit, and graciousness. Graciousness matters most of all. Stay remarkable and gracious (the "be gracious" ethos à la Guy Kawasaki's Think Remarkable); how you treat people is who you are.

Think different, we celebrate the different ones

We're big fans of Think Different. We celebrate people who are genuinely different: the ones who see things their own way; here, different is a feature, not a bug. The line between crazy and brilliant is a fine one. We seek it and walk it every day, respect each other for daring to, and keep each other grounded.

Less lippin', more shippin'

Fast, great execution beats perfection: talk less, ship more, and iterate in the open. Decide fast, and pivot past your own decisions just as fast when the evidence says so. No attachment to yesterday's call.

AI-native, AI-first

AI is in the loop everywhere; 10x–100x leverage is the baseline we work from, not a bonus.

Radical honesty & challenge each other

Candid and no-spin, with each other and with the outside world. We never stop learning, and we challenge each other's work ego-free, so we become all we can be.

Extreme ownership

You own outcomes end to end: real accountability, no bureaucracy to hide behind.

Turn every penny twice

We're frugal by nature. We've known hard times, so we spend the company's money like it's our own, stay resourceful, and learn from past mistakes instead of repeating them.

Passion & obsession

We genuinely love this, obsessed with the craft, the product, and the mission.

Work hard, together, in the room or in the cloud

Real intensity, together. We run 996 (the founder runs 997), with a living-room vibe. Office-first, but we make the virtual side work at the same intensity: a digital living-room office for whoever's remote. And we work hard, play hard: the genuine version: we joke around and have fun all day, take the odd team off-site, and share long lunches and dinners (the founder trained as a top chef at 18 and loves to cook and host), and we work relentlessly.

Share the upside

20% of the company goes to the team. We win together.

A note on how we hire: Stephane is self-made, autodidactic and self-educated. An Ivy-League (or top-school) background is always a plus, but given the founder's own path it's never held against you if you don't have one. We hire for growth, grit and graciousness over pedigree. We love people who are genuinely different.