Founding Engineer

Share; Amsterdam; On-site; EUR 70,000 - 100,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive Salary & Equity package

Paid Business Travel

Ownership in startup

Job summary

Share in Amsterdam is seeking a Founding Software Engineer to take ownership of critical technical domains including payments and billing systems. You'll work closely with the CTO on production systems integral to our ISP partners, leveraging your deep TypeScript and backend expertise.

This role requires 7+ years of software engineering experience and a mindset of using AI tools daily as part of the development process. A competitive salary and equity package are offered in a venture-backed startup.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, 3 in backend systems handling financial transactions.
• Expertise in TypeScript and Node.js, capable of designing NestJS microservices.
• Experience with payment gateway integrations and PostgreSQL schema design.
• Production experience with event-driven architectures like Kafka or RabbitMQ.
• Ability to ship production code from specifications without waiting for task breakdown.

Responsibilities

• Own critical technical domains such as payments, billing, and integration.
• Work directly with the CTO to ship production systems for ISP partners.
• Utilize AI tools in daily workflow and improve AI-assisted processes.

Skills

TypeScript

Node.js

PostgreSQL

Event-driven architecture

Payment gateway integrations

AI tools usage

Job description

About Share

Share is a venture-backed internet infrastructure network building Africa’s backbone. The company aggregates underutilized telecom infrastructure, fiber, subsea cables, and data centers, and provides ISPs with scalable access to bandwidth without traditional upfront costs. Through an open-access model, local internet providers can deliver dramatically faster speeds to their subscribers without raising their own costs.

The Platform Team

The platform team builds the software that makes this work: billing, payments, subscriber management, RADIUS-based network authentication, and integrations with ISP billing systems and mobile money providers. We are replacing legacy, non-API systems with a modern API platform, and real money is already flowing through the system. This is a small, high-intensity engineering team building core infrastructure under real deadlines. You will own entire domains, not tickets.

The Role

We are hiring a Founding Software Engineer to take ownership of the platform’s most critical technical domains: the payments pipeline (collections, revenue splitting, treasury operations), the billing engine (subscription lifecycle, cycle management, automated renewals), and the integration layer (BSS/OSS sync with partner systems). You will work directly with the CTO and a small team of engineers to ship production systems that handle real financial transactions for real ISP partners.

Non-negotiable

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in backend systems handling real financial transactions (payments, billing, ledger, or treasury)
• Deep TypeScript/Node.js expertise. You should be able to design a NestJS microservice from scratch, not just work in one.
• Production experience with payment gateway integrations (M-Pesa, Stripe, Adyen, or similar). You understand STK push flows, webhook idempotency, callback signature verification, and reconciliation.
• Strong PostgreSQL skills. You can design schemas for financial data, write migrations, and reason about transaction isolation and locking.
• Experience with event-driven architectures (Kafka, RabbitMQ, or similar). You understand the difference between request-reply and fire-and-forget patterns and when to use each.
• You ship. You can take a spec document and turn it into production code without waiting for someone to break it into small tasks.

AI-augmented Engineering (required Mindset)

We expect every engineer at Share to use AI tools as a daily part of their workflow. This is not optional and not aspirational — it is how we operate. Our entire project planning, specification, and documentation process runs through AI-assisted sessions. Our codebase includes AI-readable context files. We use Claude for architecture decisions, code review, spec generation, and technical writing.

What this means for you

• You already use AI coding assistants (Claude, Cursor, Copilot, or similar) daily and can articulate how they change your workflow.
• You are comfortable working with AI-generated specifications and can critically evaluate them, push back where they are wrong, and extend them where they are incomplete.
• You see AI as a force multiplier that lets a small team operate at the capacity of a much larger one. You are not threatened by it; you are faster because of it.
• You are willing to contribute to improving our AI-assisted workflows — better prompts, better context files, better session structures.

Compensation & Details

• Competitive Salary & Equity package
• Additional Benefits
• Paid Business Travel when needed
• Ownership in a venture-backed early stage startup building the future of physical and digital infrastructure in Africa