Core Engineer – Founding Systems Engineer

deCircle; City Of London; Remote; GBP 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

A tech startup is seeking a Founding Systems Engineer to help design and build core system components for their platform. The ideal candidate has over 5 years of experience in fullstack or backend systems, extensive knowledge in Typescript and Node.js, and a passion for developing secure, intelligent workspaces. This role offers high ownership, a flexible remote culture, and meaningful equity.

Benefits

High ownership

Flexible remote culture

Meaningful equity

Qualifications

• 5+ years of fullstack or backend systems experience, ideally in early-stage teams.
• Deep expertise in Typescript, Node.js, and JavaScript frameworks.
• Strong grasp of distributed systems and real-time data sync.

Responsibilities

• Design the real-time sync engine and versioning infrastructure.
• Implement secure identity and access control protocols.
• Build the foundation for general-purpose documents.

Skills

Typescript

Node.js

JavaScript frameworks

GraphQL

Distributed systems

Real-time data sync

Rust

Go

Kubernetes

Terraform

Job description

At Powerhouse, we’re reimagining how people collaborate, building the next generation of secure, intelligent workspaces where code, communication, and coordination flow seamlessly. We combine principles from decentralized systems, strong cryptography, AI, and product design to bring verifiable, offline-resilient, multiplayer-native collaboration to life.

We're still early, and we're building from first principles. That means no drag-and-drop legacy thinking, but designing every system as if it’s a protocol in a secure and intelligent operating system for teams.

If you love solving deep technical problems and want to ship infrastructure that will power the future of work, let’s talk.

What You’ll Work On

As a Founding Systems Engineer, you’ll partner closely with our founders and early team to design and build core primitives of the Powerhouse platform:

• Design the real-time sync engine, merging logic, and versioning infrastructure (CRDTs, ephemeral branching, patching)

• Implement secure identity and access control, including passkeys, WebAuthn, and multisig protocols

• Build the foundation for general-purpose documents (text, spreadsheets, diagrams) and their calculated state

• Integrate decentralized storage & encryption layers (IPFS, E2E encryption, attachments)

• Shape developer-facing schema tooling, builder-pattern APIs, GraphQL directives, and codegen interfaces

• Prototype lightweight AI/autocomplete/codegen features that augment the authoring experience

• Own end-to-end services, from infrastructure to backend APIs and light frontend wiring

Why Join Now

• Shape a radically new way of working from the ground up

• Work with a founding team with experience in crypto, real-time infra, and developer tools

• Build primitives that will last.

• High ownership, flexible remote culture, and meaningful equity

• 5+ years of fullstack or backend systems experience, ideally at early-stage or high-autonomy teams, bringing deep expertise in Typescript, Node.js, plus most Javascript frameworks and libraries.

• A healthy obsession with clean APIs, especially GraphQL, type-safe schema design, and developer experience

• Strong grasp of distributed systems, real-time data sync, or CRDT/OT algorithms

• Fluency in a systems language (Rust, Go, or similar),

• Familiarity with cryptographic primitives, auth flows (OAuth2, WebAuthn), and secure app development

• Some experience with infra-as-code, cloud orchestration (Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD)
  

Bonus Points

• You’ve built an editor, collaboration tool, or dev platform before

• You’ve worked on decentralized storage, messaging protocols, or p2p systems

• You’ve contributed to open-source tools around schema, security, or realtime infra

• You have AI/LLM integration experience (codegen, embeddings, prompt pipelines)