Founding Product Engineer

FOUNDING PRODUCT ENGINEER Location: New York City, NY. Hybrid preferred. Open to exceptional remote candidates based in the United States. Experience: 3+ years of professional software engineering experience. We care more about what you have built and owned than a specific number of years. Industry: Artificial Intelligence, Fintech, Accounting Software, B2B SaaS Employment Type: Full-time Compensation: Competitive salary plus meaningful early-stage equity. ABOUT PORTER Porter is building the finance team every growing company deserves. Startups and small businesses currently have to choose between managing finance themselves, relying on outdated software and disconnected service providers, or hiring an expensive internal team. Porter replaces that mess with one product: a modern financial system, AI employees that perform the work, and human experts who keep everything accurate and accountable. We are not putting a chatbot on top of QuickBooks. We are building the AI-native financial system that can eventually replace it. Porter already helps businesses with bookkeeping, reporting, accounts receivable, accounts payable, payroll workflows, and financial insights. Customers can work with Porter through our application, Claude, Slack, email, and MCP. AI handles the repetitive work, while humans review and approve consequential financial actions. We are a VC-backed, early-stage company in New York City. We are looking for a product-minded engineer who wants an unusually large amount of ownership. THE ROLE This is not a role where a product manager writes tickets and hands them to you. You will own important customer problems from beginning to end: - Talk directly with founders, operators, and finance teams. - Decide what the right product should be. - Design the user experience and technical approach. - Build across frontend, backend, AI, data, and integrations. - Ship your work to production. - Observe how customers use it and improve it based on what you learn. - Help establish Porter’s engineering culture, architecture, and product standards. Within your first few months, you should expect to own a major part of Porter, not merely contribute code to it. WHAT YOU MIGHT BUILD - AI finance agents that perform work previously handled by accountants and operations teams. - Reliable tools that let AI understand and act on complete financial data. - Human approval systems for consequential AI actions. - Financial workflows for invoicing, collections, bills, payments, payroll, reporting, and month-end close. - Integrations with banking, accounting, payroll, payment, and communication platforms. - Interfaces that make complex financial information understandable to business owners. - Infrastructure for permissions, audit trails, reconciliation, observability, and AI evaluation. - New ways for customers to use Porter through the web application, Slack, email, Claude, and MCP. WHY THE PROBLEMS ARE INTERESTING Accounting is one of the most compelling applications for AI because the work is repetitive, contextual, rules-heavy, and enormously consequential. Building it well requires much more than wrapping a language model: - Agents need access to hundreds of precise financial actions. - Every recommendation must be grounded in complete and verifiable data. - Financial systems must reconcile exactly, not approximately. - AI actions need permissions, approvals, and durable audit trails. - Integrations must survive inconsistent external data and changing APIs. - The product must explain complex accounting to people who have never studied accounting. You will help solve these as product, systems, and user-experience problems rather than isolated AI demonstrations. OUR STACK - React and TypeScript - Python and FastAPI - PostgreSQL - LLM agents and tool calling - Model Context Protocol - AI evaluation and observability - Financial data pipelines - QuickBooks, Plaid, Stripe, payroll, banking, and communication integrations You do not need experience with every technology in our stack. You should be excited to work across several of them. WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR You will thrive at Porter if you: - Have at least 3 years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent evidence that you can build and ship production software. - Have shipped real products rather than only completing assigned tickets. - Can work across the frontend and backend. - Are comfortable moving between product thinking and technical implementation. - Care about the details users experience, not only whether the code works. - Know when to move quickly and when correctness requires slowing down. - Enjoy learning complicated and unfamiliar domains. - Communicate clearly and challenge ideas constructively. - Take responsibility for outcomes after deployment. - Want your judgment to shape the product and company. - Are excited to work directly with customers and founders. You do not need an accounting background. You do need the curiosity and discipline to learn how financial systems work. BONUS POINTS - Experience building AI agents or production LLM applications. - Experience with fintech, accounting, payments, banking, or financial data. - Experience owning a product area at an early-stage startup. - Experience designing APIs, integrations, or distributed workflows. - Strong product-design instincts. - Experience building systems where security, auditability, and correctness matter. THIS ROLE MAY NOT BE FOR YOU IF - You want a narrowly defined frontend-only or backend-only position. - You prefer requirements to be completely settled before beginning. - You measure your contribution primarily by tickets closed. - You want multiple layers between engineering and customers. - You are excited by AI demos but not by the difficult systems required to make AI dependable. WHY PORTER Massive ownership: Help establish the product, architecture, and engineering culture while the team is still small. Real AI-native work: Build agents that perform consequential work inside a real financial system of record. Visible customer impact: What you ship will change how founders understand and operate their businesses. Exceptional learning: Work across AI, fintech, accounting, integrations, product design, and company building. Meaningful upside: Receive competitive compensation and meaningful equity in a VC-backed company at an early stage. Founder access: Work directly with founders who bring deep experience in startup operations, financial technology, AI, data systems, and product development. HOW TO APPLY Send us: 1. Something you built that you are genuinely proud of. 2. The hardest product or engineering decision you made while building it. 3. Why Porter’s mission interests you. A resume is useful, but evidence of ownership matters more. Build the financial operating system that millions of businesses should have had all along.