Founding Engineer

Volca; New York (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Top tier healthcare plans

Daily free lunch

Unlimited PTO

Wellhub Access

Comp in the 180-210 range

Job summary

Volca is building an AI-powered payroll and operations platform for home services in New York. As Founding Engineer, you’ll join the core team and shape product direction using Ruby on Rails, React, and modern cloud tools.

The role is in-person at our Gramercy office with high ownership and a willingness to work 50–55 hours weekly. We offer top-tier healthcare, daily lunch, unlimited PTO, Wellhub Access, and competitive compensation in the 180–210k range, reflecting a strong startup trajectory

Qualifications

• Solid front-end biased full stack engineer with AI app experience.
• Experience or demonstrable curiosity in applied AI agents.
• Strong system design and Ruby on Rails/React proficiency.

Responsibilities

• Join founding engineering team and translate vague problems into deliverables.
• Own the onboarding workflow: make AI-native experiences intuitive for non‑experts.
• Take AP workflows from beta customers toward scalable, reliable use.

Skills

Front-end focused full stack

Applied AI

Ruby on Rails

React

AWS

Redis

Tools

AWS

PostgreSQL

Redis

Job description

Founding Engineer @ Volca

Wanted: Top Tier Engineer Looking to Work on Applied AI in a Small, High Autonomy Team

What we do:

The Industry:

Home services are a funny space. On average, when we hop on a call whether sales or CS we're talking to some guy from rural Ohio named Frank who's been sweating his ass off, cramped in someone's dark, musty basement trying to fix their water heater for the last 4 hours. And yet every time, without fail, Frank will get on with us beaming ear to ear and chipper as ever.

The folks who get into the home services space do it specifically because they like the manual work. They like getting their hands dirty and tinkering. They'd rather be out in the field than cramped at a desk. Yet, they all inevitably end up in excel trying to push numbers around and get a handle on their business. Our customers are always happy to talk to us expressly because we help get them out of excel and off that desk. This has been and always will be our north star.

Our Product:

We started in payroll. The founders spent months manually calculating technician commissions and bonuses by hand to understand the problem space as if they'd been working at a shop themselves. The thing about HVAC/Plumbing/Electrical commissions is that everyone has a different way of doing it. No two plans are exactly the same. With our deep knowledge of home services pay programs we've created an AI agent that can take historical documentation/calculations and automate the entire process end to end. We're talking 10+ hours of work down to 20 minutes in an average use case.

We took our payroll product from 0-2M ARR in about 8 months. As we continued to invest in sales and CS to scale that product further we also started thinking about the future. Lots of our customers were having issues paying out commissions properly because they didn't have a good sense of what materials were used on a given job. They'd come to us every week asking if we could help them keep their AP (Accounts Payable) tracking in order, which made for a pretty logical next product. So we started building.

We've got our MVP up and live in front of customers actively holding calls with them every week learning where the pain points are. Over the next few months we expect this to crystallize into a killer product helping our customer keep track of what materials are used on each job.

Where We're At:

We've recently gone 0-2M in ARR in about 8 months and pushing hard to hit the 3.5-4 range by the end of the year. It's an aggressive goal but we'd always rather set a high bar and find ourselves top of the market even if we miss. This is backed up by 7 million in funding raised from great VCs and angels like Pathlight Ventures, Metaprop, GTM Fund, early hires at Ramp/Plaid/Robinhood etc.

With current trajectory we'll be looking to raise our Series A late this year or early next which this role will be crucial for. We're currently at engineering capacity and looking to solve some bottlenecks that will improve our prospects in a fund raise dramatically.

We've got an awesome, spacious office in Gramercy where all 12 of us currently work. We're committed to an in person working environment and everyone shows up every day to inch the company forward together. Right now the team is 3 founders, 3 engineers, 2 CS, and 4 sales. Over the next 6 months we plan on investing across all 4 groups to keep up our early momentum.

Who we are:

• We're a group of young new yorkers who really love working with the folks in the home services space and finding new problems of theirs to solve. There is a massive amount of agency dolled out to each person at the org. The founders are here to keep the train the tracks but the actual problems getting solved and work getting done each day fall on the shoulders of every person at the org.
• We work hard, in person. When you're at a fast growing company there is a perpetual state of more work than capacity to do that work. The team is typically pushing things forward for 50-55 hours a week and stepping in when there's emergencies as well. This isn't the place to expect a 9am-5pm punch out. On the same token, we also treat everyone like adults. If something comes up the team will step in and the expectation goes both ways.
• We also take our work very seriously but ourselves very unseriously. When people aren't headphones in working on getting something out the door there's a constant stream of shooting the shit. We genuinely have a really great time in the office everyday.

What you’ll do:

You’ll join the founding engineering team alongside our CTO (Jack) and 3 other engineers. Day to day Jack or the customer success team will give you really vague problems that need solving and then you’ll budget your own time to figure out how to get those problems solved. General themes that we’re dealing with right now:

• Completely removing CS from our onboarding process: How do we make an AI native workflow intuitive to people who have basically zero experience interacting with an agent?
• Owning the communication around payroll: Even though the plans being run are bespoke to each business the workflows around that data are pretty consistent. How do we establish generic workflows around truly unstructured data?
• Taking AP from 3 beta customers to 10 die-hards: How do we take an initial product/agent and turn it into something reliable enough people can't live without it?

Who you should be:

Right now we’re looking for this hire to fall into one of two (or both) categories:

• A solid front end biased full stack engineer. Our first engineer, Gavin, has built our entire front end himself and we’re looking to take some of that burden off his plate.
• Either previous experience working on applied AI agents or demonstrable curiosity in the realm. Both of our products have a heavy AI agent aspect to them and we’ll need you to be able to jump in day 1.

If you feel like you’re in one but definitely interested in the other we can help you bridge that gap and get you the experience you’re looking for. Our whole eng team definitely flexes to whatever needs working on. Either way our general tech stack is: Ruby on Rails, React, Postgres, AWS, Redis. Nothing crazy. You’ll need to be able to speak intelligently about system design in addition to one of the two above topics.

If All The Above Sounds Perfect

We’d love to talk to you. In addition working out of our excellent office and all the free snacks you could want we also offer:

• Top tier healthcare plans
• Daily free lunch
• Unlimited PTO
• Wellhub Access
• Comp in the 180-210 range