Founding Full-Stack Engineer

👋 About Caven Caven is building the conversational intelligence infrastructure for Europe's regulated firms. Every important meeting contains valuable information: decisions, commitments, context, relationships, expertise and things that need to happen next. Today, most of that knowledge disappears after every conversation. Caven captures those conversations, processes them securely and turns them into structured knowledge that firms can search, query and use across the tools they already work with. We're starting with law firms, banks, M&A boutiques, Private Equity, notaries and other regulated businesses — firms where conversations contain some of their most valuable information, but confidentiality makes mainstream AI tools difficult to use. That makes Caven a very different engineering problem from building another meeting-notes app. We're combining audio, AI, data and security to turn messy conversations into reliable, structured knowledge that can be searched and connected to the tools firms already use. The hard part is making that work with sensitive real-world data: imperfect transcriptions and AI outputs, encryption, permissions, provenance, realtime processing, knowledge extraction, retrieval and integrations — while maintaining the reliability and security that regulated customers require. We're freshly funded by imec.istart and are now looking for our first software engineer to help us built the foundation of our product and technical direction. 🎯 The Role You'll work directly with the founders to turn customer problems into production software — from understanding what to build and making the technical trade-offs to shipping it. You'll own meaningful parts of the stack from day one and have a real say in how Caven evolves as we grow. You'll help shape: Product direction: turning customer problems into useful productsArchitecture: making the technical decisions that will shape Caven for yearsSecurity: building the foundations our customers need to trust us with their most sensitive dataEngineering practices: deciding how we build, test and operate softwareDeveloper tooling: finding ways for a small team to move exceptionally fastWhat we build next: staying close to customers and challenging assumptionsThe team: helping define our engineering culture and eventually the people we hire We don't expect you to have all the answers, we're looking for someone who enjoys figuring them out. 💻 What you'll do Own and evolve our TypeScript stack across the Electron desktop app, React/Vite web frontend, Expo/React Native mobile app and Express/Node.js backend.Take features from idea to prototype to production, driven directly by user feedback.Build integrations that connect Caven with the tools our customers already use.Build the foundations of our API/MCP layer, making Caven's conversational knowledge accessible across a firm's existing stack.Design and implement secure systems for handling sensitive conversational data.Work across data, infrastructure, AI and product to turn conversations into structured, searchable knowledge.Establish engineering standards around testing, observability, reliability and security as the team grows.Use AI-native tooling such as Claude Code and OpenCode to increase your leverage and help a small team ship exceptionally quickly. 🙋 About you Must-haves At least 1+ year of professional full-stack experienceYou understand encryption fundamentals and can help build a genuinely secure data environment.Strong across the stack: TypeScript, Node backend, cloud infra, encryption, data storage and transfer principles.Product instinct: you find the right technical solution to a user problem, not just the obvious one.You ship fast without cutting corners on reliability or security Experience with LLMs, speech-to-text, audio pipelines, retrieval/RAG, knowledge graphs, security, compliance or 0→1 products is a big plus. Who you are Direct communicator: you say what you think and can take honest feedback the same wayOwnership: you pick up a problem because it needs solving, not because it's in your laneMamba mentality: You have a drive to be successful and you have the flexibility and mindset to achieve results 🤩 What we offer Founding-team ownership: you'll be one of the earliest people at Caven, with genuine influence over the product, architecture and company.Full-time employment with a competitive salary and participation in our ESOP / stock option plan, with the exact package depending on experience and stage.Open to freelance/contractor arrangements for the right personYou'll work directly with the founding team every day — no layers of management, no corporate bureaucracy.Hybrid setup in Ghent with flexibility. Access to the events, community and free gym at our office in Wintercircus 🎪The tools you need to do your best work: we're AI-native and don't cheap out on developer tooling.The opportunity to shape the product, architecture and engineering culture from the ground up 📋 Process Intro call with David (CEO). What we're building, what you're after.Technical deep-dive with Jelle (CTO). How you think, how you ship.Technical case study in our offices in Ghent. Real problem, real context.Final chat and offer How to apply: Send a short note on what you've built and why this resonates to david@caven.io Caven is an equal opportunity employer. We hiring decisions based on skills, experience, potential and alignment with the role.