Founding Senior Engineer

Engg; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Baro in NYC (Hybrid) is hiring its founding senior engineer to ship product and lead a tiny team from day one. You’ll own the growth engine end to end, building the self-optimizing systems, and scale the engineering function as Baro grows.

You’ll work directly with the founders on the data and infrastructure layer, collaborating with growth and GTM leads, and shaping the architecture that underpins Baro's expanding customer base and revenue ramp.

Qualifications

• 3–4+ years building production systems with end-to-end ownership.
• Experience coaching engineers and growing talent.
• Experience in growth/e-commerce engineering and integrating third-party APIs.
• Experience with LLM-powered or agentic systems and data modeling.

Responsibilities

• Own the growth engine end to end and ship product with a small team.
• Scale engineering by hiring and mentoring engineers as the company grows.
• Collaborate with growth and GTM leads on Shopify, Meta, and TikTok integrations.
• Instrument and capture outcomes as structured events to inform product decisions.

Skills

Production systems

Team leadership

Growth/e-commerce engineering

LLM-powered systems

Data modeling

Tools

Shopify API integration

Meta Ads API

TikTok Ads API

Klaviyo / ESP internals

Job description

Founding Senior Engineer Baro · The AI General Manager for consumer brands · NYC (Hybrid) · Full-time

About Baro

Baro is the AI General Manager for consumer brands, helping them grow faster, run leaner, and reach the right retailers. Baro sees the whole business, recommends actions tied to the founder's goals, and executes approved work through the right tools, vendors, or specialists. Each result improves the next recommendation. The same data helps brands find the right shelves and helps retailers discover brands with proven demand. Founders keep control and focus on building great products. We're backed by a16z speedrun and have 10+ customers already. Our brands see a >50% average revenue lift once Baro's customer record is live.

The role

You'll be engineer #2 on a 5-person team, working directly with the founders. We need you to be a player-coach from day one: shipping product yourself while helping to manage and scale the engineering team. Between now and October we're building the product out so we can scale our customer base, and you'll own the engineering behind our growth engine end to end:

• The self-optimizing growth system. The agentic core of Baro: read the customer record, recommend the brand's next move with explicit tradeoffs, get the founder's approval, execute, and then learn from the result so the next recommendation beats the last.
• The growth surfaces. The tools behind how our brands actually grow: creator seeding, D2C conversion (storefront and CRO), ad audiences and creative, and lifecycle email/SMS. This all must be built in close collaboration with our growth and GTM leads.
• Retail tooling comes next.
• The orchestration layer. Deep, reliable integrations with Shopify, Meta, and TikTok, plus an email/SMS engine.
• Instrumentation from day one. Every recommendation, action, and outcome captured as a structured event with attribution and confidence. This is the data the whole company compounds on, and it can't be backfilled, so we treat it as product, not plumbing.

You'll build on Baro's customer record in close partnership with our founding engineer, who is focused on the data and infrastructure layer beneath all of this. This is a hands-on leadership role. You'll be our senior-most engineer, you'll manage a (very) small team, and you'll drive our next engineering hires. Nothing we're building requires exotic engineering yet. It requires someone who ships relentlessly, loves this domain, and makes the people around them better. You might be a fit if you:

You might be a fit if you

• Have 3–4+ years building production systems with real end-to-end ownership. You've designed the schema, shipped the service, carried the pager, and lived with your own decisions.
• Have managed or coached engineers (a team of 1–2 is plenty). What matters is that you've grown someone, not just directed them.
• Love growth and e-commerce engineering: conversion, campaigns, creator and lifecycle tooling. This is the heart of the role, so if growth problems bore you, this isn't your job.
• Have built LLM-powered or agentic systems that integrate third-party APIs.
• Have strong data-modeling instincts.
• Ship fast and own outcomes, and you're energized by being a player-coach on a tiny team.

Strong pluses

• Commerce or martech surface area: Shopify apps and APIs, Meta/TikTok ads APIs, ESP/Klaviyo internals, CDPs, attribution
• Early-stage experience (e.g., you've done 0→1 before, or badly want to)

Why now

• Founding equity and founding scope. The architecture and the engineering culture that you set become the company's foundation.
• 10+ customers live. We get paid based on these brands revenue, so the upside is uncapped and the systems you build are the business.
• Momentum. Backed by a16z speedrun, brands live today, demo day in October.

Compensation $150,000–$200,000+ base and 1%+ equity. Where you land in the range depends on experience; we'll be transparent about our math.

Applications reviewed on a rolling basis.