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Founding Engineer

Summary

A founding engineer at Waybill, the first engineer on the team, owns a vertical end-to-end (e.g., sourcing, logistics, inventory) from customer interaction to building and shipping, using TypeScript, LangGraph, Node, Express, Postgres, and other tech.

You'd be one of the first engineers here, and you'd own a vertical end to end.

By "own a vertical" we mean something specific. Not a ticket queue. You take a real part of the business; sourcing, negotiation, logistics and customs, inventory, or the buyer-facing product, and you're the person responsible for it working. You talk to the customers who use it. You decide what gets built. You write it, ship it, watch it break at 2am, and fix it. When it works well, that's your win. When it doesn't, nobody's going to hand you a spec explaining why.

Concretely, in your first few weeks you might:

- Build a new agent in our procurement pipeline — something that reads a BOM and decomposes it into sourceable line items, or one that handles customs documentation.

- Take our negotiation agent from "usually gets a better price" to "reliably beats what a good human buyer would get," which means building the evaluation harness to even know if you did.

- Design the inventory system from scratch — what's on the shelf, what's in transit, what's committed, and what a hardware team actually needs to see.

- Sit with a customer's procurement lead for a day, watch what they do, and come back and rebuild the part of our product that was quietly wrong.

What we work with

TypeScript end to end.

Agents and backend. LangGraph, Node, Express, Postgres, Langfuse - yes we take our evals seriously.

Product. Next.js, React, Tailwind, shadcn/ui, TanStack Query

Data and infra. Postgres, Drizzle, Vercel

You don't need to have used all of this. Most people haven't. What matters is that you can pick up an unfamiliar tool quickly and have opinions about it a week later.

Who we're looking for

We care much more about how you think than what you've already used.

You should be someone who:

- Ships. You have things you've built that real people used — a startup, an open source project, something at a previous job you can point at and say "that was mine."

- Is genuinely fast. Not sloppy-fast. Fast because you have good instincts about what to skip.

- Has taste about when to be rigorous and when not to be. A negotiation agent that talks to suppliers with our customers' money needs guardrails. An internal admin tool does not. Knowing the difference is most of the job.

- Wants to understand the domain. The best engineers here will know what an MPN is, why RoHS compliance matters, what a customs broker actually does, and why lead times slip. That knowledge isn't a distraction from the engineering — it is the engineering.

- Is comfortable without a manager. We won't tell you what to build most weeks. If that sounds stressful rather than exciting, this isn't the right role.

Nice to have, not required:

- You've built with LLMs beyond wrapping a chat API — tool calling, structured outputs, evals, agents that run for a long time and can fail halfway through.

- You've worked in supply chain, logistics, manufacturing, or hardware.

- You've been early at a startup before and know what the first two years feel like.

What we're not looking for: someone who wants a clearly defined scope and a well-groomed backlog. That's a real preference and a reasonable one, it's just not what this job is.

What it's like here

We work in person in Bengaluru, six days a week. Early-stage companies get built by people in a room together, and we're not going to pretend otherwise.

The work is unglamorous in the way that good startup work usually is. You'll spend time on procurement edge cases, on the specific way one distributor formats their quotes, on why a shipment cleared customs in Chennai but not Mumbai and tweak the workflow. The reward is that the thing you build gets used the same week by someone whose job just got meaningfully easier.

We give real equity to early engineers, because the people who build this should own a piece of it.

If you're on the fence, apply anyway and tell us what you've built. We read everything.

See also

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