Founding Engineer

Proxify; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Proxify, NYC hybrid, is hiring Founding Engineer to join CTO and founders to build the product from zero. You will own the application end-to-end, from frontend to data layer, and shape the architecture as we scale the platform for AI-driven proxy advisory.

You'll work directly with the CTO and the founding team, shipping core features, defining data models, and shaping engineering culture in a fast-moving seed-stage environment.

Qualifications

• Experience shipping complex full-stack products end-to-end.
• Experience with frontend React and typed backend APIs.
• Able to work in ambiguity and prefer prototyping over perfect specs.

Responsibilities

• Own the application end-to-end: frontend, API, data model, auth, customer surfaces.
• Ship the first end-to-end product loop: intake, AI-driven recommendation, and rendered output with rationale and audit trail.
• Build data, evaluation, and feedback surfaces to understand AI correctness and failure modes.
• Help shape the engineering culture, hiring bar, and review practices for future hires.
• Pair with the CTO on how to build it; pair with founders on what to build and why.

Skills

TypeScript

React

API design

Data modeling

Tools

Node.js

REST APIs

Job description

TL;DR

Early engineering hire at a well-funded seed-stage startup taking on the proxy advisory duopoly with AI. Hybrid NYC, work directly with the CTO and founders to build the product from zero, with real architectural ownership.

About Us

Proxify is a pioneering AI startup rebuilding the proxy advisory stack for institutional investors. Proxy advisory is a high-stakes, historically low-tech industry dominated by a legacy duopoly. Our platform helps institutional investors make faster, more transparent, and more customized voting decisions by extracting complex data from SEC filings, proxy statements, company materials, media sources, and alternative data providers, then applying investor-specific policy models to generate explainable voting recommendations. We are building the infrastructure for a more modern, transparent, and customizable approach to corporate governance

We’ve raised a sizable seed, the founding team blends deep capital markets experience with technical leadership, and we’re moving fast. Proxy season is concentrated, and we want a product in front of design partners in time to matter.

The role

You’d be employee #2 on the engineering side, working directly with our CTO. Your primary

remit is the application, the customer-facing UI, the API layer, the data model, and everything

that turns the AI pipeline into a product people actually use.

The first 3-6 months will look something like:

• Own the application end-to-end. Frontend, API layer, data model, auth, the customer-facing surfaces. Architecture is still being finalized, so there’s real room to challenge and shape it.
• Ship the first end-to-end product loop: a proxy statement comes in, the pipeline produces a defensible recommendation aligned to a customer’s voting policy, the app renders it with full rationale and audit trail.
• Build the data, evaluation, and feedback surfaces that let us see when the AI is right, when it’s wrong, and why.
• Help shape the engineering culture, hiring bar, and review practices for future engineering hires.
• Pair with the CTO on how to build it; pair with the founders on what to build and why.You won’t be siloed in one layer of the stack — you’ll talk directly to the asset managers and analysts who use what we build, and as the team grows there’s room to take on infra, the LLM pipeline itself, or anything else you want to grow into.

Who we’re looking for

The non-negotiable: you’ve been an early stage engineer somewhere, or you were the person at a larger company who consistently ended up doing the 0-to-1 work. You’re at home with ambiguity, you reach for a working prototype before a perfect spec. Beyond that, we care about:

• A track record of shipping complex full-stack products end-to-end. You’ve owned production systems across the UI, API, and data layer, and you’ve lived with the trade-offs you made.
• Strong TypeScript across the stack. Type-safe end-to-end is a hard preference for us.
• Comfortable in React on the frontend, designing a typed API on the backend, and modelling a tricky data flow without losing that discipline. Specific framework choices are open and we welcome being challenged on them.
• Good judgement about when to reach for AI, when to write boring code, and when to talk to a customer instead of writing anything at all.

LLM-backed product experience is a nice-to-have, not a requirement, but there’ll be plenty of opportunity to grow into RAG, evals, and agentic workflows on the job if that’s where you want to head. Background in fintech, regtech, or other regulated audit-heavy domains is also a plus but not required.

Practical bits

• Title: Founding Engineer
• Reports to: CTO
• Location: Hybrid in NYC. We have an office and we like seeing each other, but no minimum days, you decide what helps you do your best work.
• Start date: As soon as you can.