Founding Software Engineer

Rockstar is recruiting for an innovative agtech startup that is pioneering transformative technology for large-scale commercial farming. The client leverages methods inspired by wastewater analytics to safeguard animal health, tackling a $300 billion challenge by empowering farmers and veterinarians to make data-driven decisions and prevent widespread livestock disease outbreaks. Their work has been featured in TIME, highlighting their impact and mission.

Role Overview

A hands-on Founding Software Engineer is sought to own and evolve a web-based analytics platform from MVP to market leader. This individual will set the technical vision, drive implementation across the stack, and ensure delivery of high-quality, reliable software in a fast-paced environment.

Key Responsibilities

- Technical Leadership & Architecture: Shape and communicate the initial architecture and technology strategy, ensuring decisions align with product goals and scale requirements.

- Full-Stack Development: Contribute hands-on across the entire stack—building new internal and external features, refactoring existing code, and integrating third-party services as needed.

- Code Quality & Best Practices: Establish and champion coding standards, testing strategies, and CI/CD workflows as necessary to maintain high code quality and accelerate delivery.

- Collaboration: Work closely with founders, data scientists, and external partners to translate user needs into technical requirements, balancing speed of iteration with long-term maintainability.

- Infrastructure & Deployment: Oversee hosting, deployment pipelines, observability and alerting infrastructure; ensure the platform is performant, secure, and cost-effective.

- Team Growth: Support hiring and growing the engineering team and culture as the company scales.

Qualifications

- Proven Leadership & Delivery

- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 1 year in a senior or lead role.

- Demonstrated track record of taking data-centric products from MVP through growth stages.

- Experience building and rapidly iterating in high-velocity, high-impact startup environments.

- Technical Expertise

- Frontend: React, Typescript, Vite, Tailwind (or equivalent frameworks).

- Backend: Node.js, Python, or similar; experience designing and securing APIs.

- Database: MySQL, Postgres, or similar; experience building robust and flexible data models.

- Cloud & Data: AWS services (S3, RDS, ECS), and familiarity with analytics stacks.

- Tooling: Git, CI/CD pipelines, observability platforms, testing frameworks.

- Data: Familiarity with large scale biological data is a plus.

- Growth Mindset

- Comfortable making decisions with ambiguous information, wearing multiple hats, and adapting quickly in a fast-paced startup environment.

- Eager to explore and apply AI and optimization tools to drive technical and business value.

- Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate with non-technical stakeholders.

Why Join This Team?

- Build Something That Matters: Work will directly contribute to protecting animal health and food systems, tackling a problem that ultimately affects all US consumers. Engineering decisions can directly help prevent disease outbreaks across millions of animals.

- High Ownership, Real Autonomy: This is not just another engineering job. As the Founding Software Engineer, there is end-to-end ownership of the product's technical foundation, and the freedom to make key architectural, infrastructure, and tooling decisions. The future of the platform and the company itself will be shaped by this role.

- Learn Fast, Grow Faster: The company is a mission-driven startup that believes in continuous learning. Whether experimenting with new AI/ML tools, adopting better dev workflows, or learning from domain experts in biology and agriculture, a culture is fostered where curiosity and iteration are expected—and rewarded.

- Work With People Who Care: Collaboration is direct with passionate founders, scientists, and field experts who are obsessed with solving meaningful problems. Deep domain knowledge is brought to the table, and engineers' needs are listened to closely.

- Scale With the Company: As the organization grows, so will this role and its impact. The opportunity exists to help build not just the product, but also the engineering team, culture, and practices from the ground up. For those excited by the idea of leveling up their own leadership, this is a launchpad.

- Competitive Compensation & Meaningful Equity: A strong salary and a meaningful equity stake are offered—so when the company wins, so does the team.