Founding Engineer, Product

Pennant AI; New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Pennant AI, a YC-backed startup in New York City, seeks an early software engineer to join the founding team and work in-person. You will own customer workflows from understanding problems through repeated production use, shaping the product with founders and delivering reliable, user-centered experiences.

You will onboard customers, provide production support, and help design multi-tenant, AI-enabled systems using React, Next.js, NestJS and PostgreSQL.

Qualifications

• Strong full-stack fundamentals in TypeScript with React and Next.js.
• Experience owning software used by real customers, including onboarding and production debugging.
• Ability to design multi-tenant data models and secure organization-scoped permissions.
• Experience shipping data-intensive products and evaluating AI/tool integrations.
• Excellent customer-facing communication to distill needs and explain tradeoffs.

Responsibilities

• Own a customer workflow from problem understanding to repeated production use.
• Lead focused research or company-engagement workflows with analysts.
• Onboard and provide production support, not just initial release.
• Contribute to product design decisions as an early engineering hire.
• Communicate with customers to identify underlying needs and tradeoffs.

Skills

TypeScript

React

Next.js

NestJS

Data modeling

Multi-tenant

Customer onboarding

LLM products

API design

Frontend/backend integration

Tools

PostgreSQL

REST APIs

LLM tooling

Job description

Full-time. Founding team. New York City, in-person required. Reports to the Co-founder & CTO and works directly with both founders and customers.

About Pennant

Pennant is a YC-backed company building software for corporate governance, starting with proxy voting and company engagement.

Institutional investors, public companies and their advisors make consequential decisions using information scattered across filings, policies, research and conversations. We bring that information together so teams can understand the evidence, apply their own judgment and preserve why they made a decision.

Our ambition is a world model for corporate governance: a system that connects institutional knowledge, policies, decisions and outcomes. Getting there starts with reliable data and software customers trust in their daily work.

The Role

Own a customer workflow from understanding the problem through repeated production use.

Your likely first assignment is a focused research or company-engagement workflow: help an analyst review evidence, make a decision and follow through. The goal is a useful, reliable sequence, not a collection of disconnected screens or an entire CRM built before a customer can use it.

As one of our first engineering hires, you will have a substantial say in the product and how we build it. Your responsibility includes onboarding and production support, not just shipping the first version.

What You Bring

• Strong full-stack fundamentals in TypeScript: component-based web applications (we use React and Next.js), typed backend APIs (we use NestJS), Postgres and data modeling.
• Product and interaction judgment. You can make a complex workflow understandable, notice consequential details and use a prototype to test an assumption before overbuilding.
• Experience owning software used by real customers, including releases, onboarding, production debugging and improvements after launch.
• Sound judgment about database transactions, durable application state and integrations. Our product is multi-tenant, so you take organization-scoped authorization seriously and test it.
• The ability to talk directly with customers, distinguish the underlying need from the requested feature, and explain technical tradeoffs without hiding behind jargon.
• Practical familiarity with LLM-powered products such as streaming chat, tool calling and evidence-backed summaries, and a willingness to evaluate their usefulness and failure modes. Deep experience shipping complex, data-intensive products can outweigh a long list of AI projects.

Experience with financial products, document viewers, approval workflows or early-stage companies is useful. We will teach the governance domain. We care more about what you have made work for customers than which framework you used.

How We Work

We work in person in New York and stay close to customers. We prototype quickly, use AI development tools where they help, and remain responsible for what we ship.

We narrow scope before compromising correctness, permissions or customer trust. We test representative cases and failure paths, observe what happens after release, and flag risks early. Founding engineers have room to make decisions and are expected to make their reasoning understandable to the team.