Founding Engineer

Job description:
Founding Engineer (Cloud Infrastructure)
New York, NY
Full time - w2,
$200K - $250K

About the Role
Founding Engineer to build at every level of the cloud infrastructure stack. This is a seat for an engineer who has been a founding engineer at a startup or two before, has tackled problems end to end in production environments, and is genuinely excited about building at an infrastructure-specific company.
The work spans production-grade software development, customer-facing problem solving, and ownership of complex technical surfaces.
If you are excited about going deep on infrastructure and want a real founding seat at a profitable Series A company growing 8x year over year, this is the role.

What You'll Own

• Write production-grade software that powers Porter's platform across cloud infrastructure surfaces
• Own end-to-end development lifecycle, from architectural design through production deployment
• Debug at the deepest levels: shell into virtual machines, dig through log files, find root causes
• Read through open-source repositories to debug third-party dependencies
• Collaborate with the team on anything that touches users' infrastructure and provide meaningful feedback
• Work in 2-week project cycles with full autonomy to propose and drive your own work
• Talk to customers directly via Slack and bring product intuition to infrastructure decisions

Must-Have

• 5-8 years of building in startups (roughly two startups' worth of experience); founding engineer or earliest technical hire roles preferred
• Track record of shipping products end-to-end; can point to code you wrote and systems you owned in production
• Genuine excitement about infrastructure problems and the infrastructure space; you want to work on cloud infrastructure specifically
• High agency; comfortable operating without a defined playbook or process
• Ability to debug and reason through complex systems under pressure
• Nice-to-Have
• Prior hands-on infrastructure experience (networking, Kubernetes, distributed systems, cloud platforms)
• Shipped products that scaled to meaningful traction or user base
• Experience moving from zero to one on a product or feature; built something novel
• Comfort with ambiguity and rapid context-switching between technical and strategic work