Founding Engineer

Rhythmic; New York (NY); On-site; USD 200,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity participation

Job summary

A fintech startup in New York seeks a Founding Engineer to lead engineering strategy and technical decision-making. This hands-on role requires accountability for production systems and experience mentoring engineers. The ideal candidate will drive development of a production-ready MVP, coordinate technical leadership, and set standards for future engineers. Ideal qualifications include modern backend service experience and familiarity with emerging technologies. Competitive compensation offered, alongside equity participation.

Qualifications

• Ownership of complex systems under real-world delivery pressure.
• Ability to operate systems dependent on third-party infrastructure.
• Experience making pragmatic architectural decisions in fast-paced environments.

Responsibilities

• Lead engineering strategy and technical decision-making.
• Coordinate technical leadership to internal engineers and contractors.
• Drive development toward a production-ready MVP.

Skills

Accountability for production systems

Mentoring engineers

Comfort with emerging technologies

Tools

Java

Python

Node.js

Go

React

AWS

Job description

Reporting to: Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO)

Compensation: Base salary $200,000 – $260,000 per year, plus meaningful early-stage equity

Stage: Pre-Seed, venture capital funded

About Rhythmic

Rhythmic is an embedded stablecoin finance company founded by senior fintech operators with experience at Circle, Mastercard, Visa, and American Express. It is backed by top-tier venture capital firms.

Stablecoins already power trillions in value, but that value rarely reaches everyday users. Rhythmic is building managed stablecoin middleware and infrastructure that enables consumer brands to offer stored value, payments, rewards, and other financial services directly inside their products, without becoming a bank or stitching together fragmented systems. We believe stablecoin finance will define the next era of fintech, and this role places you at the center of building that future.

The Role

Rhythmic is hiring a Founding Engineer to lead the long-term engineering strategy plus day-to-day execution and technical decision-making as the company moves into active product development. This is a principal-level, hands-on builder role with direct authority over core platform decisions at the company’s earliest stage. You will work closely with the CPTO, who owns product strategy and roadmap, while you drive execution, sequencing, and technical judgment across how the platform is built, hardened, and operated in production.

You will invent, prototype, and pressure-test new ideas while owning the hard production realities that follow, pairing exploration of new technologies with accountability for correctness, reliability, and real-world outcomes.

The role is focused on the areas of greatest impact. You will coordinate and provide technical leadership to early internal engineers and contractors, while owning critical architecture, code paths, and production systems. You will set the technical bar and decision-making norms that future engineers build on.

What We’re Looking For

We are looking for a principal-level, hands-on engineer who has owned complex systems under real delivery pressure and is comfortable being accountable for outcomes, not just implementations. Strong candidates can point to specific examples of personally owning systems under production load, including responsibility for failures, incidents, and remediation.

• Personally owned production systems end-to-end, including accountability for outages, failures, data inconsistencies, and operational reliability under real user load
• Operated systems dependent on third-party infrastructure (payments, card issuing, identity, KYC, or other regulated services) where vendor failures still left you accountable for outcomes
• Mentored or guided other engineers in high-ownership environments, even without formal management titles

You should be comfortable making pragmatic architectural and execution decisions, writing production code across the stack, and balancing speed with long-term integrity in an early-stage environment where requirements evolve. This role is not intended to teach someone how to become a senior engineer; it assumes you already are one.

We are especially excited by engineers who build outside their day job through side projects, open-source work, hackathons, or hands-on experimentation with emerging technologies.

Technical Expectations

Experience operating modern backend services in production using Java, Python, Node.js, or Go, alongside React, relational and non-relational databases, event-driven systems, and cloud-based production operations including AWS, CI/CD, and monitoring.

Comfort using AI-assisted development tools to accelerate implementation and iteration in a lean engineering environment is a plus. Experience with crypto, blockchain, and smart contract-based systems is a strong plus, particularly where those systems intersect with regulated financial workflows, custody models, and real economic risk.

Milestones

Priorities will change, requirements will be wrong, and surprises will happen along the way.

First 90 Days

• Assume ownership of a platform moving from early architecture into active development
• Make execution decisions on sequencing, scope, service boundaries, and integrations under real constraints
• Drive early development toward a production-ready MVP
• Coordinate and provide technical leadership to external and internal contributors
• Establish production-grade environments, CI/CD, security, observability, and operational foundations

By Month 6

• Operate a production-ready platform supporting stored value, card issuance, funding and withdrawals, stablecoin orchestration, treasury logic, and configurable rewards
• Ensure reliability, auditability, and regulatory readiness
• Continue internalizing critical engineering capabilities as the platform matures

By Month 12

• Scale the platform to additional partners and higher transaction volume
• Increase proprietary ownership of core infrastructure, platform logic, and data models
• Advance platform capabilities that enable new embedded finance use cases
• Help prepare the engineering function for the company’s next stage of growth