Founding Engineer

Decky; Portland (OR); On-site; USD 72,000 - 88,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

2% equity

Direct access to founders

Job summary

Decky, based in Portland, Oregon, is seeking a dedicated engineer to join as the 4th employee. You will develop AI-powered presentation automation tools used by enterprise customers and shape the product's future directions.

The role offers 2% equity, a salary of $80K, and direct access to the co-founders, providing a unique opportunity for ownership and growth within a startup environment.

Qualifications

• Obsessed with building impactful products and features.
• Ability to understand enterprise contexts and customer needs.
• Experience in early-stage startups is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Build the web app, API, and integrations with CRM tools.
• Own product areas and make architectural decisions.
• Shape product strategy and roadmap.

Skills

Experience with LLMs

Document generation

Presentation tooling

Comfortable with ambiguity

Enterprise empathy

Job description

We're hiring our first dedicated engineer. You'll be the 4th employee — building the AI pipeline, web app, Chrome extension, and API that enterprise customers are already using.

2% equity, direct access to both founders, and the kind of ownership most engineers don't get until they start their own company.

Company momentum

Traction - Paying customers + inbound from large enterprises

Team size - You will be the 4th employee on the team

What is Decky

Every deck on brand, in minutes — AI-powered presentation automation built for the way enterprise teams actually work.

Sales and customer success teams spend hours manually building decks from templates. Decky fixes that. Connect your existing Google Slides or PowerPoint template, feed it your data, and Decky generates polished, on-brand presentations automatically.

We're a small team of three, the product is live and in customers' hands, and we're actively raising our pre‑seed round. We've already closed enough to bring on a full‑time engineer — you'd be the 4th employee. We're not pre‑product, pre‑revenue, or pre‑customer. We're at the stage where the right engineer joining now shapes what this becomes — and shares meaningfully in what it's worth.

What you'll actually build

• Web app, MCP, and API surface used in production today
• Integrations with HubSpot, Salesforce, and data sources customers already live in
• Admin dashboards, usage analytics, and brand compliance tooling
• The infra that lets this scale from 1,000 users to millions of enterprise users

We work across the modern AI tooling ecosystem and move with the frontier.

Day to day, that means multi-model routing, RAG pipelines grounded in brand data and templates, agentic workflows that parse/plan/generate end-to-end, and fine-tuning for brand voice and layout constraints.

You should be comfortable with LLM APIs, orchestration frameworks, vector DBs, evals, and observability tooling.

Your first 90 days

Days 1–30

Get deep in the product

Learn the codebase end-to-end, ship your first real feature, and talk directly to customers. No orientation theater.

Days 31–60

Own a meaningful surface

Take full ownership of a core product area — likely the generation pipeline or enterprise integration layer — and start making architectural decisions.

Days 61–90

Shape what comes next

You're in the room for product strategy. Your instincts about what to build — and what not to — are actively shaping the roadmap.

Who we're looking for

• Obsessed. Not enthusiastic — obsessed.
• Side projects that actually ship
• Can't stop thinking about the product
• Comfortable with ambiguity
• Enterprise empathy — talks to customers without being asked
• Comfortable at any layer of the stack — knows when to go deep vs. move fast
• Has built things that real users relied on
• Experience with LLMs, document generation, or presentation tooling is a genuine plus. But we care more about the quality of your thinking than how closely your resume matches this list.

Nice to have

• Experience working in an enterprise context where brand compliance is a legal requirement
• Experience with LLMs, document generation, or presentation tooling
• Background in early-stage startups or founding engineering roles

Compensation

• 2% equity — 4-year vest, 1-year cliff, path to Head of Engineering
• $80K salary — startup-stage, scales with funding milestones
• Direct access to both founders — no layers, no middlemen

Who you'll work with

Co-founder & CEO

Previously scaled a company from zero to significant revenue. Leads product direction, go-to-market, and the enterprise relationships that are already knocking on our door.

Graham Foster

Co-founder & CTO

The architect behind Decky's core engine and your direct manager. Graham owns the technical roadmap — from AI pipelines to infrastructure — and will be your primary collaborator on everything you build.

You'll report directly to Graham and work closely with Mike on the product and customer side. No layers, no middlemen — just two founders who want to build something great and need a third person obsessed enough to help them do it.

The honest part

This is not a 9-to-5. The salary is startup-stage — below what a company with a Series A budget would offer, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. What we're offering instead is 2% equity in something that enterprise customers are already asking for, direct access to both founders, and the kind of ownership most engineers don't get until they start their own company. If you're wired for that trade, we want to hear from you.