Sr. Engineer (Founding Engineer)

RangeWater Residential; Hardeeville (SC); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

RangeWater Residential in Atlanta, GA seeks a founding-engineer to own the entire platform—backend services, data stores, deployment, and uptime. You’ll deploy, monitor, and on-call for a production system handling sensitive business data, design distributed services, and ship UI features with AI tooling.

This one-person-engineer role requires startup discipline, strong technical judgment, and the ability to shape the platform and the team as RangeWater grows.

Qualifications

• 6+ years building backend or distributed systems, with end-to-end ownership.
• Builder mindset: own the whole problem, not a slice.
• Excellent technical judgment for tradeoffs and business impact.
• Experience owning production, security, data integrity, and uptime.
• Strong stakeholder instincts and ability to translate needs for quick delivery.
• Adaptable and ambitious as RangeWater grows the platform and team.

Responsibilities

• Own the entire platform: backend services, data stores, deployment, and uptime.
• Design and operate distributed systems and APIs (REST/gRPC).
• Run production databases (SQL/NoSQL), migrations, and backups.
• Operate real infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD; on-call when needed.
• Integrate with third-party APIs and build with AI tooling as a multiplier.
• Ship complex UI features in React without a dedicated front-end specialist.
• Bonus: data engineering (Airflow, Kafka) and AI-driven improvements.

Skills

Java/Spring

Distributed systems

REST/gRPC

SQL/NoSQL

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD

On-call

React UI

Airflow

Kafka

Job description

RangeWater Residential — Atlanta, GA (Hybrid in office/remote)

Sole technical owner of our internal operations platform

Sr. Engineer (Founding Engineer)

RangeWater Residential — Atlanta, GA (Hybrid in office/remote)

Sole technical owner of our internal operations platform

Who we are

RangeWater Residential is a leader in property management, based in Atlanta, Georgia. Fueled by strong growth and a tech-savvy culture, we've built an in-house platform that streamlines our operations and puts AI tooling in our teams' hands. We run engineering like a startup inside the company: small, fast, and accountable for outcomes rather than tickets.

The role

This is a founding-engineer seat, not a feature-team job. You'll be the engineer behind a production platform the business relies on every month — backend services, data stores, infrastructure, and third-party integrations. There's no platform team behind you: you deploy it, you monitor it, you're on call when it breaks, and you decide what gets built next by sitting with the people who use it. With modern AI tooling, we expect one exceptional engineer to operate at the pace of a small team, and we'll equip you accordingly.

Because you'll be the primary owner, you should be genuinely comfortable across distributed, production systems, and comfortable being the last line of defense for a system that holds sensitive business data.

The technical bar

Concretely, you should be able to:

• Own a Java / Spring Boot backend end to end — API design, data modeling, microservices, transactions, performance, and security.
• Design and operate distributed systems — service-to-service APIs (REST/gRPC), event-driven pipelines, and the tradeoffs between them.
• Run production databases yourself: schema design, migrations, query tuning, and backups across SQL and NoSQL.
• Operate real infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, logs, and monitoring — and you've been on the on-call hook when something went down.
• Integrate with messy third-party and partner APIs and make the result reliable at scale.
• Ship polished, complex UIs in React unsupervised — no designer or front-end specialist holding your hand.
• Bonus: data engineering (Airflow, Kafka, or similar) and building with LLMs as a force multiplier.

Who you are

• 6+ years building backend or distributed systems, including at least one stretch where you shipped something end to end alone or on a very small team — a startup, a founding-engineer role, or a system with real users that was truly yours. Big-tech experience is valuable, but on its own it may not translate: this role has none of that scaffolding.
• A builder first. You'd rather own the whole problem than a slice of it.
• Excellent technical judgment — you can weigh a tradeoff, see its business implications, and make the call without a committee.
• Comfortable owning production end to end — security, data integrity, and uptime are yours, including carrying on-call.
• Strong stakeholder instincts. You can sit with a non-technical user, understand what they actually need, and ship it quickly.
• Adaptable and ambitious. As RangeWater grows, you grow into the technical leader who builds the team around this platform.

You may be a good fit if you

• Ship. You've built things start to finish — backend, infra, and the plumbing between them — with no safety net.
• Have run production on your own — deployed it, monitored it, resolved incidents, and made sure they didn't recur.
• Like iterating with users. You'd rather sit with the person who has the problem than guess at it from your desk.
• Get hooked on hard technical problems. Reverse-engineering a messy integration or hardening a system under real load sounds like a good week.
• Want to transform businesses with AI. You're driven to figure out how AI can reshape the way a company operates — and you already use it to multiply your own output.
• Have taste. You know the difference between code that runs and a system that holds up in production.
• Treat a blank page as a starting line, not a wall.

What you'll own (first year)

• The entire platform: backend services, data stores, deployment, and uptime.
• Hardening it — security, data integrity, tests, and documentation worthy of a system the business depends on.
• Shipping the stakeholder backlog at startup pace.
• Laying the technical foundation — and eventually the team — for what comes next.