Founding Engineer, Full Stack + AI

The role You'll be our first engineering hire, working directly with Justin (cofounder, technical) and Alan (cofounder, everything else). There's no team to hand things off to. You'll take problems from "a client is seeing this" to shipped and running in production, and you'll decide much of the how yourself. Engineering Strong TypeScript across backend and frontendProduction experience with Node.js APIs and ReactSolid SQL and relational schema design, including migrations against a live production databaseExperience with background jobs and queues, and the reliability concerns that come with them: retries, idempotency, failure handlingExperience integrating third-party APIs and dealing with their failure modes — flaky endpoints, missing data, bad documentationYou test your work and care about it holding up in production AI and LLM systems Prompt engineering as engineering: versioned prompts, structured outputs, tool calling, handling bad model responsesRetrieval and knowledge architecture — you can design how an agent finds the right information at the right time, and pick the right approach for the problem instead of defaulting to oneYou can design systems that decide when to act automatically, when to ask a human, and when to stay out of the wayYou evaluate model changes with evidence, not vibes: test sets, regressions, measurable qualityAwareness of the ways LLM systems fail in customer-facing products, and how to design against them Nice to have Experience with social media platform APIs (Meta, Instagram, TikTok)Experience with visual editor UIsExperience in customer support, social media, or marketing toolingDesign sense. We don't have a designer What it's actually like This is a small team doing a lot, and the hours are long. Scope changes when customers teach us something, sometimes week to week. You'll talk to customers, fix things that aren't technically "your" problem, and make calls without anyone to check with first. If you want a well-defined role with clear boundaries, this isn't it, and that's fine. In return, you get real ownership of a production system with paying customers, equity in the company, a voice in every decision, and the fastest way there is to learn how a software company gets built. Pay Salary plus equity. The salary is below what larger companies pay, and the equity is meant to make up the difference. We share the full numbers, salary and equity, in the first conversation, so nobody wastes time. Experience There's no required number of years. We care about what you've built. If you're early in your career, show us evidence: something you shipped, people who used it, a hard problem you solved. How to apply Apply via this post, and then send three answers to the questions below to alan@superpower.social: A link to something you built and shipped (a product, repo, demo or write-up), and which part was yours.A paragraph or two answering this: Our AI writes replies to public comments on brands' paid ads. What's the first thing you'd worry about going wrong, and how would you catch it before a client does?A paragraph or two answering this: Tell us about something you started or took over with nobody asking you to, like a product, a side business, a club, or a broken process at work. What did you do, how did it turn out, and what would you do differently? Please refrain from writing this entirely with AI, we read every single one of these, and we'll know right away. We would rather you send something shorter that you wrote yourself, vs. longer and AI written. We won't review applications that are missing an email.