Founding Engineer — Shape Infrastructure & Equity

Pioneer Square Labs; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Meaningful equity

Ground-floor opportunity

Job summary

A tech startup is seeking a Founding Engineer to join their team in Seattle, Washington. This role involves architecting and building scalable backend systems while working closely with founders on product direction. Ideal candidates have 4-7 years of software engineering experience, a track record of scaling production systems, and are comfortable navigating early-stage ambiguity. Competitive salary and equity options are offered at this ground-floor opportunity where your decisions will shape the company.

Qualifications

• 4–7 years of software engineering experience with strong fundamentals.
• Demonstrated track record building and scaling production systems.
• Comfortable in early-stage ambiguity and able to define problems.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build scalable backend and infrastructure systems.
• Work across the full stack, owning problems end-to-end.
• Establish engineering standards, tooling, and practices.

Skills

Software engineering experience

Backend and infrastructure

Modern AI development tools

Problem definition

Tools

Claude

Cursor

Codex

Job description

A tech startup is seeking a Founding Engineer to join their team in Seattle, Washington. This role involves architecting and building scalable backend systems while working closely with founders on product direction. Ideal candidates have 4-7 years of software engineering experience, a track record of scaling production systems, and are comfortable navigating early-stage ambiguity. Competitive salary and equity options are offered at this ground-floor opportunity where your decisions will shape the company.