Founding Engineer

Every week, non-technical operators ship more software. AI tools like Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor have made "vibe coding" real - but these apps slam into the "Day 2 Wall" the moment they need to touch production data, enforce SSO, or manage secrets. Today, that leaves enterprises with a growing pile of unmanaged liabilities. Stoda turns those liabilities into governed, production-grade assets. We wrap operator-built applications in deterministic infrastructure guardrails - letting anyone use any coding tool to build software that deploys to the company's cloud under the company's business rules. You'll be a founding member of our Strike Team: embedding with enterprise design partners to deliver the governance Stoda promises by hand, while building the automated backend that lets us deliver it at scale. Part engineer, part solution architect, part customer-facing operator. What You'll Do This role is the engine of the Stoda flywheel; you deliver operating value today while building the automated product of tomorrow. Most companies keep their FDEs in a sandbox: you do the customer integration work, then hand a wishlist to a separate product team that owns the real codebase. We do the opposite. The patterns you discover in the field become the product, written by you, merged into Stoda Core. Your customer work and your product work are the same work. ​Customer Embedding & Integration: Work directly with CTOs and technical leaders to integrate the Stoda runtime into their specific cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure).Infrastructure Automation: Use Python and Terraform to provision cloud services and artifacts automatically, building IaC workflows that reduce customer onboarding time from hours to minutes with minimal manual involvement.Policy-to-Code Engineering: Identify recurring patterns across customer environments and translate them into deterministic, repeatable rules within Stoda's Engine - writing the backend logic that converts natural-language business policies into enforceable code.Lifecycle Automation: Build agents that automate "Day 2" realities, such as dependency patching and test generation, so operator-built apps stay secure and functional without manual intervention.Roadmap Influence: Turn front-line insights from design partners into prioritized platform features, such as traffic-management proxies and granular data-access controls.Harness Evolution: Continuously benchmark emerging coding agents to surface new "Day 2" liabilities, and use those insights to iterate on the Stoda Core architecture and Enterprise Engine. Who You Are You think in systems and outcomes, not just features. You care whether the platform actually solves a business process safely and reliably.You believe that as AI coding tools advance, the best software to run a team will increasingly be built by the operators closest to the problem, not only by traditional engineering teams.You know functional code is the easy part. Without governance, operator-built apps are unmanaged liabilities with catastrophic security and operational risk. Closing that gap is what gets you out of bed.You don't just use Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor; you deconstruct their output because you want to understand how these agents behave under the hood, so you can engineer the harness that governs them.You can translate complex technical concepts for CTOs and non-technical operators alike.You thrive in fast-moving environments where the "best tool" changes daily, and the solution changes monthly. You want to define categories and embrace the messy reality of 0-to-1 building. Qualifications 7+ years in software, platform, or infrastructure engineering.Expert-level Python, with a proven track record of building backend products that automate infrastructure, networking, or security tasks.Deep infrastructure knowledge: production experience with Kubernetes and at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure).AI/LLM proficiency: hands-on experience with AI APIs (Claude, OpenAI) and a working understanding of prompt engineering, RAG pipelines, and agentic workflows.Consulting discipline: professional services or field engineering experience, with the ability to own a customer relationship over a multi-month engagement.Strong communicator: prior customer-facing support and/or sales experience. Bonus if you've been the bridge between technical and non-technical stakeholders.Ownership mindset: you care about production rollout, reliability, and measurable impact.Eligibility: legally authorized to work in Canada. Nice-to-have: front-end development with Next.js and established design systems. Why Stoda? We're a battle-tested founding team with a track record of scaling organizations from 1 to 160 employees. We're venture-backed and are ready to deliver against ambitious first-year goals. We’re building the builder-agnostic governance layer that will be the single hub for the future of AI-generated code. This is a builder's seat, not a service desk. You'll ship to the core product, not a queue of feature requests; the kind of ownership and influence only the earliest engineers ever get. As a ground-floor hire, you'll take a competitive salary and generous equity, a meaningful stake in what we build together. You'll work hybrid from our Toronto office near Union Station (2–3 days in person) and report directly to the CEO/CTO.