Software Engineer

Ploy; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Ploy is hiring a Founding Engineer to own end-to-end product experiences across the stack. You will partner with product and design, own projects from idea to shipped to scaled, and help shape engineering culture as the company grows.

You’ll build 0→1 features, leverage AI tools, and design scalable systems with a focus on UX quality, reliability, and performance. Join a small, fast-moving team building a growth engine for modern marketing teams.

Qualifications

• Must have shipped 0→1 products or led a new product initiative.
• Comfortable as a full-stack engineer across frontend and backend.
• Strong product sense and ability to reason about user workflows and trade-offs.
• Strong UI craft and attention to detail in implementation.
• Ability to design fast, reliable, scalable software systems.

Responsibilities

• Build 0→1 product features end-to-end from discovery to launch and iteration.
• Work across the stack (web app, backend, data) with a bias toward durable systems.
• Collaborate with founders and designers to translate ambiguity into execution.
• Push AI-enabled product experiences and learn alongside teammates.
• Improve engineering foundations: architecture, tooling, testing, and release processes.
• Own projects from idea through shipping to scaling and maintenance.

Skills

0→1 products

Full-stack engineer

Product sense

Design intuition

Systems mindset

Job description

About Ploy

Ploy is building an AI-native growth engine for modern marketing teams — combining high-leverage product experiences with reliable, scalable systems.

We’re a small, fast-moving team shipping new product surfaces weekly and hardening them for real production traffic. If you enjoy building end-to-end products, sweating details, and scaling what you ship, you’ll fit in well.

The role

As a Founding Engineer, you’ll work across the stack to build core product experiences and the systems behind them. You’ll partner closely with product and design, own projects from idea → shipped → scaled, and help shape the engineering culture and technical direction as we grow.

What You’ll Do

• Build 0→1 product features end-to-end: discovery, technical design, implementation, launch, and iteration.
• Use the latest AI tools every day — build with them, push their limits, and learn alongside teammates doing the same.
• Ship across the stack (web app, backend services, data, infrastructure) with a bias toward simple, durable systems.
• Build product experiences with strong UX quality: interaction design, performance, and polish.
• Design and operate systems that scale: reliability, observability, capacity planning, cost/performance trade-offs.
• Improve our engineering foundations: architecture, tooling, CI, testing, release processes, and on‑call hygiene.
• Collaborate tightly with founders and teammates, turning ambiguous problems into crisp execution.

What we’re looking for

Must-haves

• Strong track record building and shipping 0→1 products (startup, new product line, or major greenfield initiative).
• Comfortable as a true full-stack engineer (front-end + backend), and willing to go wherever the work is.
• Strong product sense: you can reason about user workflows, trade-offs, and “what matters” without needing perfect specs.
• Design intuition: you care about craft, and you can implement clean UI with attention to detail.
• Systems mindset: you enjoy making software fast, reliable, and maintainable as usage grows.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience scaling products and systems through inflection points (10× traffic, new customer segments, new pricing/billing complexity).
• Experience with AI-powered products (LLMs, agentic systems, evaluation/observability, prompt/tooling pipelines).
• Prior experience as an early engineer or founder in a high-ownership environment.
• Experience in the web and marketing space.

How we work

• Small teams, high ownership, fast iteration.
• Engineers own product: you’ll partner directly with design and founders, and have real agency over what we build and why.
• Pragmatic engineering: ship quickly, then harden with the right abstractions.
• We value clear thinking, taste, and accountability over ceremony.