Founding Engineer
Summary
Founding engineer at a stealth, pre-launch Paris startup: work directly with founders to own systems end to end, set engineering standards, and ship the MVP — spanning customer-facing product, correctness-critical and high-volume data systems, and platform/CI work. Stack: Next.js, React, Node, TypeScript, PostgreSQL. Equity-heavy package.
Compensation: €40k – €70k • 1.0% – 5.0%
ABOUT
Early-stage startup, pre-launch. Our MVP is nearly ready. We're in stealth so we can share more about the product in a call
THE ROLE
We're hiring our founding engineer.
You'll own systems end to end and make the architecture decisions on them. You'll have input on what we build, not only how. Being able to talk to customers directly is a plus. Equity is a large part of the package.
You'd work directly with the founders. Decisions get made in a day, not in a planning cycle. There's no ticket queue and no one handing you scoped work. The first focus is to reach our MVP.
You'll set the technical standards the next engineers inherit: how we test, how we review, what we automate. As the team grows, the role grows with it. If you want to lead engineering here, that's on the table.
We'll shape the role around the right person rather than the other way round.
WHAT YOU'LL WORK ON
- Customer-facing product. Complex, stateful interfaces used daily.
- Correctness-critical systems where bugs are costly.
- High-volume data processing that runs unattended.
- Platform work: performance, security, reliability, deployments.
- Engineering foundations: testing, tooling, automated checks, CI.
Stack: Next.js, React, Node, TypeScript, PostgreSQL.
REQUIREMENTS
- Several years shipping production software.
- Ability to ship secure and reliable code fast, leveraging AI technologies.
- B2B software experience: multi-tenant, permissioned, in production.
- Full-stack. Strong on both UI and backend/data.
- SQL and relational data modelling.
- Experience with concurrency, partial failures and production edge cases.
- You ship complete work: tested, monitored, handed over.
- You can define a spec yourself.
- Comfortable without process. No PM, no QA, no backlog groomed for you.
NICE TO HAVE
- Founding or first-engineer experience.
- Product and design judgement.
- PostgreSQL at depth: query performance, migrations, data modelling.
- Next.js and React on a large application.
- Taking a product from prototype to first paying customers.
- Setting up CI, observability or test infrastructure from scratch.
COMPENSATION
Salary plus meaningful equity. We can weight the package towards salary, towards equity, or split it — that's a conversation, not a fixed grid.