Founding VP of Engineering / Full Stack Co-Founder

Founding Full Stack Engineer — Owlera Location: Remote Stage: Pre-Seed Compensation: Equity-based initially, with potential salary as funding and company growth allow Commitment: Long-term founding team opportunity About Owlera Owlera is an AI-powered professional experience platform designed to help students and early-career talent build real-world experience and prove what they can do. We transform how companies actually work into virtual simulated internships, where students complete realistic missions, interact with AI managers, use company resources, receive performance-based evaluation, and build verified evidence of their skills and professional readiness. For employers, Owlera provides a new way to develop, evaluate, and identify talent before hiring. The Opportunity We are looking for a highly capable Founding Full Stack Engineer who can take ownership of Owlera's technical platform and help transform our validated MVP into a scalable production product. This is not a narrow frontend or backend position. You will work directly with the founder and AI engineer and have significant ownership over how the platform is designed, built, launched, and scaled. We want to operate as a small, highly productive team that uses modern AI development tools to move significantly faster than a traditional engineering team. What You'll Build & Own You will help architect and build the core Owlera platform, including student and employer applications, authentication and permissions, internship creation and management, missions and assignments, company resource systems, student submissions, dashboards, progress tracking, performance data, Career Passport, notifications, real-time experiences, and integrations with Owlera's AI systems. You will also: * Own frontend and backend architecture * Design scalable APIs, databases, and application infrastructure * Build secure multi-user and multi-company systems * Integrate AI Managers, AI evaluators, RAG and other AI services developed with our AI engineer * Build real-time communication and interactive workplace experiences * Establish cloud infrastructure, deployment, monitoring, testing, security, and reliability * Use AI coding and development tools extensively to accelerate execution * Make pragmatic build-vs-buy decisions * Help move Owlera from MVP to production and prepare the platform for significant user growth * Eventually help build and lead the engineering team as the company grows What We're Looking For We are looking for someone with strong experience across modern full-stack product development, ideally including Node.js/TypeScript, React/Next.js or similar technologies, PostgreSQL or comparable databases, APIs, cloud infrastructure such as AWS, and production deployment. Experience building a product from 0 to 1 is particularly important. Experience with startups, SaaS architecture, real-time systems, AI/LLM integrations, Docker, CI/CD, scalable backend architecture, security, and technical leadership is highly valuable. Most importantly, we want someone who can own problems rather than wait for specifications, move quickly, make sound technical decisions, and build alongside a small founding team.