Founding engineer

DibsList; Northern (KY); Hybrid; Full time

Job description

We’re building the substrate. Come help.

DibsList is a small team in San Francisco building a permissioned object graph for physical goods. We're hiring engineers and community-minded humans who want to ship the future of consumer infrastructure.

Three people, a Convex deployment, a long roadmap.

We’re a tiny, opinionated team. We meet in person three days a week in SF, write everything down in shared docs, and ship to production on Friday afternoons because nothing else keeps you honest like a Friday deploy.

We’re funded by a small group of believer-investors and we’re hiring slowly and on purpose. The next three hires will set the tone for the next ten.

How we work

The handful of things we care about.

Write more than you talk

Decisions live in shared docs. Slack is for ‘heads-up,’ not architecture debates.

Ship the smallest thing

If you can demo it on Friday, ship it on Friday. The next iteration is closer than you think.

Privacy by default

We treat user data the way we'd want our own treated. The first answer is always ‘don't store it.’

Less code, fewer abstractions, fewer features. Every feature that lives also has to be maintained.

Read the source

If the docs disagree with the code, the code wins. Then we fix the docs.

Take time off

Burnout is a debt with compounding interest. We pay it down on purpose.

Own a vertical slice end-to-end: schema → API → web. You'll ship features that thousands of users feel — within days, not quarters.

You’ll

• Ship features end-to-end across Convex, Next.js, and TypeScript.
• Help us scale the parser registry to 250+ retailers.
• Build the deal pipeline + ownership transfer flow.
• Pair with the founding team on architecture, hiring, and product.
• 5+ years building production software you're proud of.
• TypeScript fluency. Comfortable in databases, queries, and indexes.
• Taste — you read the code you write and ask ‘is this the right shape?’

Own the long tail of receipts. Every new retailer is a puzzle. You'll build the system that solves them automatically — with the LLM only when the deterministic stack runs out.

You’ll

• Improve the structured + DSL parser tiers.
• Design schema-constrained LLM fallback prompts and the synthesis loop.
• Build drift detection, backtests, and the approval flow for new templates.
• Drive the per-user LLM-cost target down toward zero.
• Hands-on experience with structured extraction or information retrieval.
• Comfort with prompting and constrained generation.
• A pragmatic view of ML — most of the work is data plumbing.
• Bonus: experience with email parsing, e-commerce data, or graph databases.

Be the voice that early adopters meet first. Write, ship, recruit, and obsess over the activation funnel from invitation to inventory-first-loaded.

You’ll

• Run the early-access waitlist and onboarding.
• Build a content engine — long-form, social, video — around the manifesto.
• Recruit our first 1,000 sellers and 10,000 buyers, one neighborhood at a time.
• Be the gravitational center of the community: events, AMAs, support.
• You've grown a product community from zero to thousands.
• You write better than most of the people in your timeline.
• Comfortable in code or close to it — you'll ship landing pages, posts, and onboarding flows.
• Bias to act, not write decks.

The package

What we offer.

Competitive cash

Top-quartile salary for early-stage SF startups.

Meaningful equity

Real ownership. Founder-grade vests for the founding cohort.

Full health

Time to recover

Unlimited PTO with a 4-week minimum enforced.

Equipment, set up well

Latest M-series MacBook + display + chair. Whatever else you need.

In-person rhythm

Three days/week in our SF office; Tuesdays are quiet code days.

Real ownership

You'll have meaningful input on hiring, comp, and culture from week one.

Don't see your role?

Tell us anyway.

If you're a designer with brand chops, a privacy engineer, an ops generalist, or someone who's spent a decade in retailer ops and wants to flip teams — we want to hear from you.

Apply by writing the email you wish someone would send you.