Original job description
Founding Engineer - Toronto (In-Office)
$110k–$130k CAD + 0.5%–1.5% equity
18 months. 100k+ users. Three people.
That's Residen. We built the platform Canadian university students actually trust to find housing, and the one landlords turn to when they want responsible tenants. Investor-backed, growing fast, expanding across the country. We're not a team of 40 pretending to be scrappy. We're a small team that's genuinely scrappy, and we haven't slowed down since launch.
Why this role exists:
We need a fourth. Not to grind through a backlog someone else wrote, but to help build the company. You'll own systems end-to-end, ship code that's in front of hundreds of thousands of users almost immediately, and sit in the room for the conversations that decide where this goes. If you've ever wanted to be early at something real, this is it.
What you'll build:
Frontend: High-traffic web and mobile in React/Next.js. You sweat the details users notice, and the ones they never will.
Backend: REST APIs in Java/Spring Boot, plus the integrations that power the core product.
Data: Schema design across MySQL and MongoDB. You think about scale before it turns into a fire.
AI: Autonomous agents that handle real parts of the leasing experience. We're early here, and you'll help decide how it goes.
You're probably:
2–4+ years building serious frontend (React, JS). Production, not tutorials.
2–4+ years on backend APIs, ideally Java/Spring Boot
Comfortable across relational and NoSQL databases
Someone with real opinions about how software should be built, and the goods to back them up
The kind of person who'd rather be in the office at midnight shipping than find out the next morning what everyone else built
Done with jobs where good ideas disappear into a Slack thread
Even better if you've:
Survived an early-stage startup (and have the scars)
Shipped something with LLMs or AI agents
Built mobile apps
Got work you can show us
The honest pitch:
We are young founders who work hard and built something special people actually use. Late nights and some weekends are normal here, not because anyone's forcing it, but because this is a small team that wants to be in the room when something's shipping. If building fast on a small team sounds like your version of a good time, this is worth a conversation. The equity and ownership are real. On a team this size, there's no other way for it to be.
How hiring works:
Three steps: a screening plus technical interview, then a longer deep-dive, then a final conversation. We move fast and keep you in the loop the whole way. No take-home black holes, no ghosting.
How to apply:
Send us something: a resume, a portfolio, a GitHub, whatever shows how you think. No cover letter. We read everything ourselves.
[email protected]
