Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer / Founding Engineer

Senior Full-Stack Developer (Founding Engineer, CTO Track) Location: Kelowna, BC · Hybrid Workplace type: Hybrid, with remote flexibility for the right person Employment type: Full-time Start date: October, 2026 Base salary: $120,000 to $180,000 CAD + Optional vesting shares THE INDUSTRY EVERYONE FORGOT TO MODERNIZE A car dealership is one of the last large, high-revenue businesses still running on software from 1998. Every lead, every service appointment, every trade appraisal, every reconditioning job passes through a DMS that nobody likes and everybody is locked into, held together by phone calls, spreadsheets, sticky notes, and one person who knows where the spare keys are. VaultDrive is the operational layer that sits above the DMS and runs the store instead of it. Sales, service, follow-up, inventory, internal comms: one system, run by AI agents, built for the people who actually work in a dealership. There are roughly 18,000 franchise dealers in the US and 3,500 in Canada, plus a far larger independent and service market. We have some of the largest dealership groups in North America in line for this product, along with active interest from vehicle manufacturers and large technology companies. The future here is bright. The constraint is speed. Windows like this one do not stay open, and the reason we are hiring at this level is that we intend to move faster than anyone else in this category. That is the job. THE ROLE Founding engineer. This is a building role first. You would be writing production code every week, shipping features customers use the same month, and making the architectural calls that decide how the whole thing holds together. Both halves, not one or the other. If you are looking for a role where you set direction and hand it to someone else to implement, this is not it. We are too small and moving too fast for that, and the person we want would not enjoy it anyway. You would work alongside our founding builder, and you would be the person we expect to grow into Chief Technology Officer as the company scales. This is not an AI chatbot company. Our agents take real action on behalf of a real business, which means the engineering bar is correctness, not cleverness. If you have built systems where being wrong has a cost, you will recognize the kind of work this is, and you will find it more interesting than most of what is on offer right now. What the job actually looks like: Building. Hands on keyboard, across the product, front and back. You ship, you review, you fix what breaks. The person who makes the architectural call here is the same person who writes the hard parts of it.Owning the architecture while you build it. Technical decisions from data model through shipped feature, made by you rather than inherited. You are not waiting on someone else's call, and you are not writing documents that someone else executes.AI and LLM engineering as the core of the product, not a bolt-on. Prompt architecture, evaluation, guardrails, and the judgment to know when a model should not be in the path at all.Working directly with the people using it. Dealership staff will tell you exactly what is wrong with what you shipped, often bluntly, and often the same day. You would be in those conversations rather than reading a summary of them, and turning that feedback into what you build next is a large part of the job. Nobody here is insulated from the customer.Reliability, monitoring, and code quality as we scale from a small number of rooftops to a large one.Our external development partner: collaborating on larger integration work now, and eventually owning that relationship.Engineering standards and hiring as we add people. The first engineering culture here is the one you set, and you set it by example rather than by policy. We are a cloud based platform with AI at the core of the product. We will go deeper on the specifics in the interview. WHO THIS IS FOR You are a builder who has earned the right to make the calls, and you want both. You are done being handed an architecture, and equally done with roles where seniority means you stopped writing code. You want to design it, build it, watch real people use it, and fix it fast. Required: 5+ years professional full-stack development, and you are still hands-on today. You will be writing code in your first week.Hands-on AI and LLM API work. You have shipped AI-driven features to real users. This is mandatory, not a nice-to-have.Strong across a modern typed web stack, front and back, plus relational databases, background job and queue systems, API design, and cloud infrastructure.A track record of ownership: you have operated as a senior or lead developer, not purely as an individual contributor, and you are looking to grow into more.Comfort with ambiguity, and with talking to customers directly. Some of the best product decisions here get made standing on a dealership floor at 8am, and you would be the one standing there.This is probably not the role for you if you are looking to step back from building, or if you would rather work from a spec than go find out for yourself what the customer needs. Strong assets: Automotive technology, dealership software, or DMS-adjacent systems.Startup experience at a stage where you were one of very few technical people in the building.Voice, telephony, real-time streaming, or speech recognition experience.You have built something that had to be right, not just shipped: payments, healthcare, compliance, anything with an audit trail. COMPENSATION, EQUITY, AND THE CTO PATH Base: $120,000 to $180,000 CAD. The top of that band is for someone who has already carried architectural ownership at scale.Vesting equity in our stock option plan. [INSERT GRANT RANGE, VESTING SCHEDULE, CLIFF.] We will put real numbers in front of you at offer stage.A genuine path to Chief Technology Officer. Not a title we are dangling. We are building something that needs a real CTO within a few years, and our strong preference is to promote the person who earns it rather than hire over top of them.Kelowna, BC, hybrid. Based out of August Luxury Motorcars, across from the airport, which puts you a 30-second walk from the customers you are building for. Remote flexibility for the right person.Direct ownership over how a category-defining product gets built, at the stage where those decisions still get made by one or two people. Our values, and the one that matters most here: fast and right, not fast instead of right. Questions before you apply: info@vaultdrive.io