Founding Engineer

Role

Founding Engineer responsible for building core systems, advanced backend products, and an AI-native engineering function that lets Frontier scale enterprise automation and workflows. The role focuses on owning complex production systems, optimizing operational tooling, designing reliable agentic harnesses, and enabling engineers and non-engineers to ship software quickly and safely using AI.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and build an AI-native engineering function with production discipline and fast shipping.
• Improve core distributed systems, backend architectures, data ingestion, search, quoting, payments, reporting, and internal copilots.
• Design agentic harnesses: repo instructions, skills, MCP tools, scripts, hooks, CI gates, evals, observability, permissions, and review loops.
• Use Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and related tools as primary development interfaces.
• Create contribution paths for non-engineers using AI tools with rigorous engineering review loops.
• Transform ambiguous operational constraints into durable systems and tooling.
• Recruit, coach, and raise the engineering bar for a lean, elite team.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with growth, sales, operations, and finance to improve revenue, margin, speed, and customer experience.

Requirements

• Strong full-stack engineering skills with a heavy backend bias.
• Production ownership experience of systems used by real customers or operators.
• Startup/high-growth experience and the ability to operate in lean teams.
• Leadership experience building, mentoring, and managing high-performing engineering teams or pods.
• Daily, hands-on experience with coding agents and deep practical knowledge of their limitations and failure modes.
• Power-user fluency with Claude, Codex, Cursor, or similar tools (frequent/high-volume usage).
• Demonstrable portfolio or concrete examples (GitHub repo, Loom, write-up) of products or systems taken from scratch to ownership.
• Proficiency with Python, PostgreSQL, and related ORM frameworks (Django and FastAPI are specified).
• Strong skills decomposing ambiguous work into specs, tests, evals, and reviewable artifacts.
• Emphasis on verification practices: tests, logs, traces, screenshots, PR reviews, and evals.
• Strategic product judgment and disciplined velocity: move quickly without creating long-term technical mess.

Preferred / Bonus Experience

• Building internal productivity tools, CRM custom engines, or dashboards for operations-heavy businesses.
• High-volume data scraping, browser automation, data parsing, or complex third-party API integrations.
• Communications automation (Slack, WhatsApp), HubSpot integrations, payment gateway experience, or workflow orchestration.
• Previously built a technical product generating meaningful revenue (e.g., $100k+) or large active user bases (e.g., 100k+ users).
• Prior co-founder or founder experience.
• Experience establishing AI guardrails: code review policies for AI-assisted contributions, IP and data-handling practices, secrets/access controls, model/tool selection, and evaluation frameworks.

What’s Offered

• High-impact ownership of infrastructure for a profitable, scaling company with established product-market fit.
• Capital stability and an organizational focus on long-term impact rather than near-term fundraising.
• Immediate leverage: software work that directly improves customer experience, margins, and capacity.
• Direct access to cofounders and senior leadership, and regular mentorship from experienced startup founders/CTOs.
• A culture emphasizing working smarter, work/life balance, speed, ownership, and direct feedback.
• Clear opportunities for personal, career, and compensation growth.
• Work in US/EST shift timings.