Hiring 3 roles :D
Type: Full-time, Remote
Hours: 40hrs/week
Rate: USD $50/hr (negotiable)
Availability: Minimum 4hrs overlap with 8am–5pm PST required. Preferred hours to be agreed before start.
Greenfield. Fully yours.
We're putting together a small core team — three leads, each owning their domain end-to-end — and we're betting that three sharp, well-equipped people can outrun a team ten times the size. If that sounds energising rather than terrifying, read on.
You'd be the first frontend hire. No existing codebase to inherit, no "we've always done it this way." Everything from the framework choice to the component architecture is yours to decide and defend.
How we start
Before any product code gets written, the team goes through a setup phase together — establishing the product design document, the roadmap, and the tooling and workflows each lead will depend on going forward. You'll be expected to own that setup for your domain: the goal is that by the time you're building, everything is in place to let you build well and keep building well.
How you'll collaborate
This is a small team, not a collection of solo operators. You'll be expected to coordinate closely with the other two leads — agreeing on interface contracts, unblocking each other, and making decisions together when your domains overlap. You'll also work directly with rotating specialists when they're engaged, and own that relationship for your domain.
Job Postings
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Job Posting 1 — Frontend Lead
What you'll own
The entire client-side of the product. That means making the foundational calls — framework, state management, component strategy, testing approach — and then building on them. You'll work with a UI/UX specialist when they're engaged, but you're the one who turns ideas into a working interface.
Part of owning the frontend means owning its quality — not just now, but going forward. We expect you to establish workflows that prevent technical debt from accumulating in the first place, not processes that clean it up after the fact.
A significant part of your collaboration time will be with our Behavioral Experience Architect — a rotating specialist focused on the psychology of engagement. Expect to spend meaningful time, translating behavioral and cognitive insights directly into frontend features. This isn't a soft "make it feel nice" brief — it's a core product differentiator and you'll be the person wiring it in.
What a good week looks like
- You've made (and documented) an architectural decision and can explain your reasoning clearly
- You've pushed something real to staging and caught your own issues before anyone else did
- You've had a productive back-and-forth with the backend lead about a shared interface contract
- You've used AI tooling to move faster than you could have alone
What we're looking for
- Strong command of modern frontend development — you've made architecture decisions, not just implemented them
- Comfortable working from rough ideas — you can turn ambiguity into a reasonable plan
- Good instincts for UX even when a designer isn't in the room
- Familiar enough with CI/CD that getting your code deployed doesn't require someone else
- A track record of shipping clean work — and the habits and tooling that make that consistent, not accidental
Nice to have:
- AWS experience (CloudFront, S3, Amplify or similar)
- Accessibility standards familiarity
- Prior greenfield / 0-to-1 product experience
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Job Posting 2 — Backend Lead
What you'll own
The server-side of the product. API design, business logic, auth, integrations, data flow. You'll collaborate with a rotating DB architect on data modelling, but the backend is your house — you design it, build it, and keep it running.
On AWS: We lean heavily on managed AWS services rather than building infrastructure we don't need to own. That means reaching for API Gateway, Lambda, SQS, and their equivalents before spinning up custom services. If AWS has a managed solution, that's the default conversation starter.
On the database: PostgreSQL is our standard for everything. That means using jsonb columns for flexible data structures, unlogged tables where appropriate (caching, ephemeral state), and leveraging Postgres features before reaching for a separate service. If you've worked with Postgres beyond basic CRUD, you'll feel at home here.
Part of owning the backend means owning its long-term health. We expect you to establish workflows and tooling that prevent technical debt from taking root — not a backlog for dealing with it later.
What a good week looks like
- Your API contracts are clear enough that the frontend lead can build against them without constant back-and-forth
- You've made a deliberate, documented architectural decision and explained your reasoning
- Something shipped that worked reliably on first deploy — not luck, but because you tested it properly
- You've used AI tooling to accelerate the parts of backend work that don't need your full attention
What we're looking for
- Solid backend fundamentals — API design, auth, error handling, data flow
- Experience owning architecture, not just executing someone else's
- Comfortable starting before every requirement is locked down
- Good judgment about when to lean on a managed service vs. when custom is justified
- Strong PostgreSQL knowledge — you know what it can do and you use it well
- Familiar with AWS managed services and how to compose them effectively
Nice to have:
- TypeScript on the backend (Node.js / Bun / Deno — make the case)
- SaaS-specific experience: multi-tenancy, billing integrations, webhooks
- Prior greenfield / 0-to-1 product experience
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Job Posting 3 — CI/CD Lead
What you'll own
The CI/CD infrastructure and everything around it — pipelines, environments, secrets management, observability, and the standards the whole team builds against.
A core part of this role is designing the system so that technical debt is structurally hard to create, not just discouraged. That means gates, checks, and automation that make doing the right thing the path of least resistance. We're not interested in accumulating a debt backlog — we're interested in building workflows that prevent it.
On AWS: We lean on managed services wherever it makes sense. That's a guiding principle you'll help enforce and build around — the infrastructure should reflect the same philosophy as the rest of the stack.
What a good week looks like
- Deployments are automated, reliable, and nobody had to ask you how to trigger one
- You've set something up that caught a problem before it hit production
- The frontend and backend leads are focused on building because the pipeline just works
- You've documented something clearly enough that a new team member could get up to speed without a walkthrough
What we're looking for
- Hands-on CI/CD experience — GitLab CI is our preference, strong experience elsewhere is fine
- Solid AWS fundamentals: IAM, networking, compute, managed services
- Security and secrets management is not an afterthought for you
- Comfortable with containerisation (Docker, ECS or similar)
- Cross-stack enough to support two other leads with different needs
- Strong instincts for automation — if something can be enforced by tooling, it should be
Nice to have:
- Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CDK, or similar)
- Observability tooling — logging, tracing, alerting
- SaaS deployment patterns: zero-downtime deploys, environment promotion, feature flags
- Prior greenfield / 0-to-1 infrastructure experience
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On AI tooling
This isn't a "we use Copilot for autocomplete" situation. We're building an AI-augmented workflow at the team level, and we need people who are already living and breathing this stuff.
What we're looking for looks something like: you've gone beyond prompting and have actually built something agentic — even if it was a weekend experiment that never shipped. An MCP server, a RAG pipeline, a LangChain workflow, something that forced you to wrestle with context management, chunking, tool use, or agent coordination. The project doesn't need to be impressive. The learning does.
If your AI experience is mostly chat-based, this probably isn't the right fit yet.
You'll have a generous AI budget, and we expect it to be a core part of how you work — not an occasional shortcut.
A few honest notes
The spec is genuinely open-ended right now — that's a feature, not a bug, but it does require comfort with ambiguity. We're a small team where everyone's work is visible, and we trust each lead to make good calls in their domain.
If you game — bonus points. It's not a requirement, but it's a good signal for the kind of person who tends to fit here.