Founding Engineer

Job summary

As the first hired engineer, you will own the outcomes of your work and build the company's product from the ground up. You will be responsible for developing backend and frontend systems, integrating AI/LLM capabilities, and adapting the business offer to meet market needs.

Job details

Company Description Superpower handles comments. We manage comments on social media. We've built something thats valuable for brands who are looking to scale ads, manage their UGC programs, manage organic comments and build out revenue generating workflows. We're a 3 person company that has some early traction. Role Description This role will be uncomfortable for most people. If you're looking for a role where its more chill, you get to learn about things in a passive way, and not think about work after you clock out, this is probably not it. We're expecting this new team member to operate like us. We work long hours, solve problems that are out of our "scope" and are constantly tweaking our offer and business to adapt. You'll be the first hired engineer for Superpower, you'll be expected to own the outcomes of your work and you'll have to assess yourself independently at times. Here is what you'll learn: How a startup is built from nothing The work ethic that's required to succeed in software All the problems that come with having essentially no work life balance how to handle problems autonomously Here is what you won't learn: how to operate in a large scale corporation How to navigate work politics to succeed in traditional work environments Here's a bunch of technical stuff that Justin(my cofounder) gave me: Engineering Strong TypeScript across backend and frontend Production experience with Node.js APIs and React Solid SQL and relational schema design, including migrations against a live production database Experience with background jobs and queues, and the reliability concerns that come with them: retries, idempotency, failure handling Experience integrating third-party APIs and dealing with their failure modes — flaky endpoints, missing data, bad documentation You test your work and care about it holding up in production AI and LLM systems Prompt engineering as engineering: versioned prompts, structured outputs, tool calling, handling bad model responses Retrieval and knowledge architecture — you can design how an agent finds the right information at the right time, and pick the right approach for the problem instead of defaulting to one You can design systems that decide when to act automatically, when to ask a human, and when to stay out of the way You evaluate model changes with evidence, not vibes: test sets, regressions, measurable quality Awareness of the ways LLM systems fail in customer-facing products, and how to design against them ** Nice to have** Experience with social media platform APIs (Meta, Instagram, TikTok) Experience with visual editor UIs Experience in customer support, social media, or marketing tooling Design sense. We don't have a designer Experience It's cool to have a couple of years in a startup environment, so you at least know what the experience is like, but it's not mandatory. Generally remember that you'll probably compete with some cracked people out there - so if you don't have the experience, make up for it somehow. (be creative) The Pay The pay will be median range, think first or second role as a full stack dev. But more importantly, you'll get equity in our company and become an actual owner of the company.

What you’ll do

As the first hired engineer, you will own the outcomes of your work and build the company's product from the ground up. You will be responsible for developing backend and frontend systems, integrating AI/LLM capabilities, and adapting the business offer to meet market needs.

Requirements

Candidates must have strong proficiency in TypeScript, Node.js, React, and SQL, with experience in production-level API and LLM system design. While a few years of startup experience is preferred, the role demands a high work ethic and the ability to operate autonomously in a high-pressure environment.

Benefits

• Equity

Listed skills

• TypeScript · Preferred
• Node.js · Preferred
• React · Preferred
• SQL · Preferred
• prompt engineering · Preferred

Other relevant skills

Identified from the job description. Confirm important requirements above.

• TypeScript
• Node.js
• React
• SQL
• Relational Schema Design
• Background Jobs
• API Integration
• Prompt Engineering
• LLM Systems
• Retrieval Architecture
• System Design
• Testing
• Social Media APIs
• Visual Editor UIs
• Design Sense

Job areas

• Software
• Technology
• Engineering