Founding EngineerFounding Engineer

Tech stack

Go, Kubernetes and Terraform are the core — that trio is on nearly every engagement, and it's what the assignment round is built around. The rest moves with the client.

• Go — services, operators, controllers, internal CLIs and deployment tooling.
• Kubernetes — managed (EKS/GKE/AKS) and, more often than you'd expect, on-premise, multi-cloud and air-gapped.
• Terraform — every environment reproducible from an empty account, plus Helm and GitOps with Argo CD or Flux.
• AWS, GCP and Azure. Deep in one is the baseline; we work across all three and you'd be expected to get productive in the others.
• TypeScript and React, Python where the work is data or AI shaped, Postgres underneath most of it.
• OpenTelemetry, Prometheus and Grafana for the parts that tell you what's actually happening.

What you'd build

• The platform a client's product runs on: the clusters, the deploy path, the environments, the glue that makes a handover survivable.
• CI/CD pipelines developers actually trust, with supply-chain hygiene built in: signed images, SBOMs, scanned dependencies.
• Observability that answers questions rather than filling dashboards — OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, structured logs, meaningful SLOs.
• The infrastructure under our AI work: inference serving, GPU scheduling, vector stores, evaluation pipelines, agent runtimes.
• Whatever the product needs to get past the MVP — API work, a migration, the frontend fix that unblocks a release. Founding engineer means the boundary moves.
• Cost engineering. FinOps is part of the job, not a quarterly cleanup.
• Controls that hold up to SOC 2 and ISO 27001 audits without a scramble.

What we're looking for

Years of experience don't matter here, and neither does a degree. We don't count them and we don't ask. You just have to show us what you can build and make the case for why we should hire you as our founding engineer. Proof beats a CV: a repo, a cluster you've run, something you shipped that people depend on.

We do have a preference: people who have worked at startups. Early-stage work teaches a particular thing — owning a problem end to end with nobody to hand it to — and that is most of this job.

• Write strong Go. Services and tooling, not just reading it.
• Work at real Kubernetes depth — not just kubectl apply. Scheduling, networking, RBAC, CRDs, and what happens when a node goes away.
• Reach for Terraform (or equivalent IaC) by default, not as a last resort.
• Move fluently across AWS, GCP and Azure — deep in one, dangerous in the other two — with the DevOps side owned as well: pipelines, releases, IAM, networking, cost.
• Debug across the whole stack, not just under it. Enough full-stack experience to open the frontend or the API and find the fault yourself, rather than filing it back to someone else — most production problems don't announce which layer they came from.
• Bring enough Linux and networking to debug below the abstraction too.
• Run something in production and stay responsible for it — you've carried a pager for something that mattered.
• Apply security instincts by default: least privilege, secrets handling, tenancy boundaries.
• Write clearly. Design docs and runbooks are half of what we deliver.
• Have worked with remote startups across time zones, and know what that actually takes: writing things down, deciding without a meeting, and being reachable when it counts without being online at 3am.
• Learn fast. Clients arrive with stacks we've never touched, and the useful skill is getting to a confident change in that codebase within days.
• Hold your own in front of a client: scoping, disagreeing well, and saying “we can't measure that yet” out loud.

Nice to have

• Air-gapped or on-premise enterprise deployments.
• MLOps or LLM/agentic systems in production, with evaluation sets.
• Rust, Python, or eBPF-level performance and observability work.
• Multi-tenant SaaS platform work, or a compliance audit you've been through.
• Open-source contributions in the cloud-native ecosystem.
• Early-stage startup experience — founding team, first engineers, or your own thing that shipped.

How to apply

Email [email protected] Email us with:

• Your CV or LinkedIn.
• A short note — a few paragraphs is plenty — on a system you built and ran, what broke, and what you changed because of it.
• Links to anything public: repos, writing, talks, side projects, homelab clusters — whatever shows the work.
• Your location and time zone, and how far out you'd be available.
• A line on why you, for this role specifically. That's the part we read closest.

We'll keep your details on file for the projects this posting is aimed at and come back to you when one lands. If you'd rather we didn't hold them, say so and we'll delete them.