Founding Engineer

Sunspell; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Sunspell in New York, NY is seeking a founding engineer to own the production application around our intelligence layer. You’ll shape architecture, front-end and back-end, manage Postgres schemas, deployment, and durable execution state, with a heavy emphasis on relational tables, filters, history, and approvals.

Expect React and TypeScript at depth, with Node or Python on the server side. You’ll join a six-person venture lab with a founder who has built and led studios for Partiful, Sentropy,

Job description

Sunspell | Founding Engineer | New York, NY | ONSITE | Full-time | https://sunspell.fm/careers/founding-engineer

Six-person venture lab in New York. We build our own products. A studio arm does client work, is profitable, and pays for the rest.

Our founder ran her own design studio and was the founding design partner on Partiful, on Sentropy before Discord bought it, on Goldcast before Cvent, on Make before Celonis, and on Descartes Labs. She builds here now instead of for other people.

You would own the production application around our intelligence layer. Architecture, frontend, backend, Postgres, durable execution state, retries and idempotency, permissions, deploys, and the data-heavy interfaces people work inside all day: tables, relationships, filters, history, approvals. React and TypeScript at depth, Node or Python behind it.

We write a lot of MCP servers and build with Claude Code daily.

Seven-plus years shipping, hands on code within the last year. Design and engineering sit in the same room here. There is no handoff.

Most people who apply like the words "founding engineer." We are looking for someone who has already started something of their own. Ownership. You should own a piece of what you build here. We are not going to post a percentage, because the honest answer depends on what you end up carrying, and we would rather work that out with you than hand you a number that pretends to be precise. It is a conversation, it is flexible, and we intend it to be fair.

We are six people. Nothing you build goes through a committee before it ships. Nothing you break, you fix alone. We are a tight team today and we are looking to double it by the end of the year.