Founding Engineer

The Role
As DreamLever's first in-house engineer, you'll lead technical execution on a live, customer-facing product. This is a hands-on leadership role: you'll write code every day, make engineering decisions, and turn product priorities into polished software.

You're energized by building and take pride in exceptional output. You'll work closely with the founder to understand the vision, translate detailed direction and prototypes into code, and move quickly from feedback to shipped improvements. Strong product judgment and UI/UX instincts help you resolve details, find efficient solutions, and deliver the intended customer experience.

This is a close working relationship with the company's founder. Expect intensive working sessions—reviewing prototypes, debating product decisions, then moving straight into building. The founder leads the product and prototyping in detail; you decide how it gets built.

You will own technical execution, drawing on the support of Scope Labs, our external engineering partner, whose team includes product managers, front-end engineers, and full-stack developers with deep knowledge of the existing system. You'll coordinate development with the founder, decide what to build autonomously and what to delegate to Scope Labs, and oversee execution to ensure we meet our product goals.

What You'll Do
Ship high-impact product improvements quickly. Build across the full stack, using coding agents effectively to accelerate development and ship well-tested code daily.
Turn product intent into working software. Take founder direction, design prototypes, and detailed feedback through implementation and polish. Resolve gaps and edge cases, and verify that the finished experience achieves the intended customer outcome.
Learn the existing system deeply and quickly. Understand the architecture, integrations, data flows, and technical risks well enough to make sound decisions and confidently build upon a live codebase.
Improve Miles's AI quality. Develop how Miles, the DreamLever system's AI Chief of Staff agent, uses company context, evaluates information, and takes action. Evaluate its outputs, investigate failures, and iterate on usefulness and reliability.
Drive coordinated, dependable delivery. Break priorities into clear work, make realistic commitments, and communicate risks early. Direct and review work delegated to Scope Labs, our external development partner, and hold the line on quality and dates across the full development team.
Contribute practical product ideas. Bring creative solutions, strong UI/UX judgment, and ideas from software and productivity tools you know well. Use these insights to improve the customer experience.
Keep the engineering foundation clear and reliable. Maintain organized code, consistent naming, and useful documentation. Improve testing, observability, and deployment where they make development faster and safer.
Who You Are
An exceptionally productive builder. You love writing software and have a track record of shipping substantial production work quickly. You use coding agents fluently, manage multiple streams of work effectively, and take responsibility for the quality of the result.

Quick to understand, quick to execute. You get oriented in unfamiliar codebases, grasp product intent, and turn direction into working software without extensive task-by-task instruction. You ask focused questions, get the context you need, and act decisively.

Focused on outcomes. You understand what a change is supposed to accomplish for the customer, and follow through until the intended outcome is achieved. You are relentless about what matters, preferring to hit triples rather than polishing singles. When everything appears urgent, you can identify what actually is, and you don't sink time into details that won't move the product. You size up a problem and know how to attack it: what you own directly, what to delegate, and where your time is best spent.

Technically strong across the stack. You can reason through backend systems, integrations, data models, asynchronous workflows, and user-facing experiences. You investigate problems methodically, trace failures to their underlying causes, and make pragmatic decisions about speed, reliability, and maintainability.

Experienced with AI in production. You've built LLM-enabled features and understand how context, evaluation, and system design affect their quality. You're curious about failures and systematic about improving results.

Thoughtful about the user experience. You care about making software simple, useful, and polished. You're interested in productivity tools and how people coordinate work, and bring practical ideas that strengthen the founder's vision.

Organized and dependable. You keep your work understandable, communicate clearly, and make commitments you can keep. When delivery is at risk, you raise it early and help find a path forward.

Collaborative, direct, and receptive to feedback. You enjoy working closely with an engaged founder. You contribute your perspective, take detailed feedback productively, and care more about a great result than whose idea gets implemented.

Energized by an early-stage company's pace. You want meaningful ownership and have the stamina to sustain a high level of output. You understand business goals and are committed to getting us to our next fundraising round, recognizing the importance of deadlines and maintaining pace to get there.

Qualifications
Approximately 3–7 years of experience building and shipping production software, with meaningful ownership of features or systems from implementation through release. Bonus if you've started something of your own or been one of the first engineers at a small company. We're looking for evidence you've owned an outcome end to end rather than worked inside someone else's process.
Strong full-stack engineering skills, including experience with APIs, integrations, asynchronous workflows, and data consistency.
Demonstrated ability to learn, extend, and improve an existing production codebase.
Hands-on experience shipping LLM-enabled features and using AI coding agents to accelerate development. Experience building agentic workflows and long-running tasks is a plus.
Strong computer-science fundamentals, whether developed through formal study or practical experience.
Experience working directly with founders, product leaders, or other non-engineering stakeholders to turn product priorities into shipped software.
Clear written and verbal communication, including the ability to explain technical trade-offs to a wide array of technical and non-technical collaborators, ensuring team alignment across the product and engineering function.
US-based. New York City area strongly preferred; remote candidates will still be considered.
Experience and proficiency working with our current stack: TypeScript (Next.js + React), Postgres (Supabase).