Founding Engineer – Full-Stack (Remote, Full-Time) [AS324] (PK)
About Smart Working
At Smart Working, we believe your job should not only look right on paper but also feel right every day. This isn’t just another remote opportunity - it’s about finding where you truly belong, no matter where you are. From day one, you’re welcomed into a genuine community that values your growth and well-being.
Our mission is simple: to break down geographic barriers and connect skilled professionals with outstanding global teams and products for full-time, long-term roles. We help you discover meaningful work with teams that invest in your success, where you’re empowered to grow personally and professionally.
Join one of the highest-rated workplaces on Glassdoor and experience what it means to thrive in a truly remote-first world.
About the Role
As a Founding Engineer, you’ll be the first in-house engineering hire, owning the platform across frontend, backend and infrastructure. You’ll scale and evolve the existing AI-native Professional Services Automation platform while continuing to deliver customer-facing features.
This is a senior/staff-level IC role with significant ownership and autonomy, with scope to grow as the company scales.
Responsibilities
- Own the product end-to-end as a solo generalist, building, shipping and deploying across frontend, backend and infrastructure without a supporting team.
- Keep the live platform healthy, including handling incidents and defects and managing safe releases and rollback.
- Use AI/agentic coding tools to increase personal output while independently verifying correctness, security and robustness rather than trusting AI-generated output blindly.
- Lead the platform towards ISO 27001 and SOC 2 readiness by April 2027, translating external compliance requirements into concrete engineering controls; prior certification experience is not required.
- Make the AI assistant and orchestration features reliable, measurable and safe.
- Decide what to preserve, isolate, improve or replace in the current platform based on customer risk and commercial value, without undertaking an unnecessary rebuild.
- Move fluidly across frontend and backend as a true full-stack generalist, with no fixed frontend/backend split.
- Harden, scale and evolve the existing product, including delivery intelligence, AI assistant, SOW ingestion, project/resource/commercial management and a beta orchestration layer, while continuing to ship customer-facing improvements.
- Work solo end-to-end as the company's hands-on technical owner, with the potential to help decide on and shape the first supporting engineering hire once funding closes.
- Work effectively with high ambiguity, evolving scope and close, direct collaboration with both technical and non-technical founders.
Requirements
- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, ideally including early-stage startup or high-ownership experience.
- 5+ years of senior-level full-stack engineering experience across a React/TypeScript frontend and Node/Postgres-style backend, or a strong modern JavaScript/TypeScript full-stack equivalent such as Next.js or Vue/Nuxt, with proven end-to-end ownership.
- 4+ years of senior-level experience with solo ownership of cloud deployment, releases and CI/CD, or a proven record of shipping and operating production infrastructure without a dedicated DevOps/platform team.
- 3+ years of senior-level experience with Postgres/Supabase or equivalent, including row-level security and edge functions. Deep relational database experience with another Postgres-based backend, Firebase or PlanetScale is also acceptable.
- 1–2+ years of senior-level experience using AI-assisted/agentic coding tools such as Cursor, Claude Code or Copilot to ship production software, or demonstrable heavy and disciplined use of LLMs within a professional development workflow.
- Have a clear method for checking AI-generated output rather than trusting it blindly.
- Be comfortable operating as a senior/staff-level individual contributor generalist and owning a product or platform end-to-end solo or near-solo; formal project-leadership titles are not required.
Nice to Have
- 1–2+ years of LLM application engineering experience covering prompt design, evaluation, grounding and orchestration/agent safety, or evidence of fast, rigorous learning in a new technical domain.
- 2+ years of security fundamentals covering multi-tenant access control, secrets management and authentication/OAuth, or a security-conscious engineering track record without a formal security title.
- Experience translating ISO 27001/SOC 2 requirements into engineering practice. No prior certification experience is required, but you must be able to research and implement compliance requirements independently ahead of the April 2027 target.
- 2+ years of startup/founding engineer or small-team, high-ownership experience, or a track record of shipping solo or near-solo end-to-end without a supporting team.
- 1+ year of rapid-prototype/AI-generated codebase remediation experience, such as with Lovable, v0 or Bolt-originated codebases, or experience stabilising and hardening fast-built code of any origin.
- 1+ year of Stripe billing/payments API integration experience, or experience with another payments or metering API integration.
Skills
As published by lever · 14 questions
Basics
In which location did you find the job?, Resume/CV, Full name, Email, Phone, Current location, Current company, LinkedIn URL, Twitter URL, GitHub URL, Portfolio URL
Pick from a list (14)
- Please respond truthfully. How many years of professional frontend engineering experience do you have using React and TypeScript?
- Please respond truthfully. How many years of professional backend engineering experience do you have using Node and Postgres-style backends?
- Please respond truthfully. How many years of experience do you have independently owning cloud deployment, releases and CI/CD, including shipping and operating production infrastructure without a dedicated DevOps or platform team?
- Please respond truthfully. How many years of experience do you have with Postgres/Supabase or an equivalent, including row-level security and edge functions?
- Please respond truthfully. What level of professional experience do you have using AI-assisted or agentic coding tools such as Cursor, Claude Code or Copilot to ship production software while independently verifying their output?
- Please respond truthfully. What level of professional experience do you have with LLM application engineering, including prompt design, evaluation, grounding and orchestration/agent safety?
- Please respond truthfully. What level of professional experience do you have implementing security fundamentals such as multi-tenant access control, secrets management and authentication/OAuth?
- Please respond truthfully. What is your level of spoken and written English?
- Are you comfortable working the fixed shift hours of 8:00 AM – 5:30 PM UK time, Monday to Friday, ensuring at least 6 hours of overlap with UK business hours?
- We are looking for candidates who can start within the next 30 days. ⚠️ Providing false or misleading information will result in disqualification. Candidates progressing to the next stage will be required to upload proof of their notice period or last working day before meeting the client. When is your earliest realistic start date?
- What is your current salary in USD PER YEAR? We will cross-check references later in the process. optional
- What is your minimum expected salary in USD PER YEAR? optional
- Are you open to negotiation?
- Do you acknowledge that submitting more than one application for the same role, or providing any false or misleading information, will automatically and permanently disqualify you from the recruitment process?