X-Technical Founder, Founding Engineer

hireVouch; Canada; Remote; CAD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Motion is seeking a founding/early senior engineer to join a tight, 80-person team and ship AI-powered features across the platform. You’ll own end-to-end delivery in a fast-moving startup environment, from design to production, with a strong ownership mentality.

You'll join Platform, Harness, or Runneth teams based on need, collaborate with cross-functional partners, and help scale a product used by marketers and creatives.

Qualifications

• Experience as a founder or early engineer shipping a product.
• Proven ability to ship in a small team with clear ownership.
• Ability to explain complex architecture, tradeoffs and design decisions.
• Comfort building without a detailed spec and handling ambiguity.
• Background from any path welcome and valued.

Responsibilities

• Ship features across the product with ownership and accountability.
• Work in a small, high-ownership cross-functional team.
• Ship to production in your first weeks and lead a major initiative within the first month.
• Collaborate to apply AI to improve the stack and outcomes.
• Identify and remove blockers to speed up delivery.

Skills

Shipping features

Cross-functional teamwork

Architecture rationale

Ownership mindset

Comfort with ambiguity

Job description

About Us

Motion is building the command center for creative strategists: an AI-native platform that bridges the gap between performance marketers and creative teams, so they can uncover what’s working, what’s not, and ship more winning ads across platforms like YouTube, LinkedIn, Meta, and TikTok.

We're at the forefront of AI as the foundation of our product. Weautomatically analyzes and organizes creative at scale and surfaces competitor trends.It's that the best marketers will use AI to operate at a scale that wasn't previously possible.

Our founders have built successful companies before, including alongside several of the people within the team. A number of teammates chose to build again here — a reflection of the trust, culture, and conviction behind what we’re building.

About the role

You've built something from zero, as a founder or early engineer. You know what it takes to find pmf, build for users, and take ownership of everything. If building is the part you loved in that experience, this is that job with a team and a product that you don’t need to bootstrap from nothing.

Motion is already a place where people chose to build again. Our founders built companies before, we have a few ex‑founders with us, and several team members have come back to Motion again.

Applying for this role includes a process of working out how you’d fit in on the team - all startups have more important work than people to do it. Engineering at Motion is roughly three teams: Platform (cloud infra, DBs, centralised services and APIs), Harness (our agentic harness Runneth, the VM it runs on, and the primitives that the Runneth experience is built on), and Runneth itself (everything customer-facing). Where you land depends on what we need most when you start and where you’re able to contribute the most impact. What we do know: you'll be building AI-powered features across the product, and you'll own what you ship.

One note on the title: founding engineer is the experience we're looking for, not the seat itself. Internally you'd join as a senior+ engineer. You bring the ownership mentality and shipping pace that founding teaches, we bring an 80-person team, runway, challenges, and a product customers already rely on.

| Our tech stack: React, Node.js with Express, TypeScript, GraphQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Azure.

What you'd be doing

• Shipping features across the product: understand the problem, make the call, build it, and own the outcome.
• Working on a small, high-ownership, cross-functional team.
• Shipping to production in your first week and owning a significant initiative in your first month.
• Working with the team to use more AI better and improve things across the stack
• Fixing whatever is in the way, you've done this before.

Our ideal fit brings

• You were the technical founder, co-founder, or one of the first engineers at a startup, and you personally wrote a meaningful share of the code, recently.
• Years of shipping product, ideally in a small team where you owned the outcome
• You can make complicated architecture sound simple. You can explain why you built what you built, what you’d change, tradeoffs you made, and how it fits together.
• Comfort building without a spec.
• Any background: self-taught, bootcamp, degree. We love talent from everywhere!

You’re probably not the right fit if:

• You're looking for a “leadership” role. This is an IC role where you get judged by your ability to ship. You will definitely show leadership, but through influence and trust, not title.
• You need process or clear requirements. It's chaotic here in the way early companies are: priorities move, context-switching is a constant, ambiguities abound, you have to do the executing.
• You're skeptical about AI. We're betting hard on not just agentic coding, but on Runneth is a bet on the idea of agentic employees. Yes there’s still work to do in adapting to the new reality, but we’re all in.