Founding Engineer, Full Stack + AI

The role

You'll be our first engineering hire, working directly with Justin (cofounder, technical) and Alan (cofounder, everything else). There's no team to hand things off to. You'll take problems from "a client is seeing this" to shipped and running in production, and you'll decide much of the how yourself.

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

What it's actually like

This is a small team doing a lot, and the hours are long. Scope changes when customers teach us something, sometimes week to week. You'll talk to customers, fix things that aren't technically "your" problem, and make calls without anyone to check with first. If you want a well-defined role with clear boundaries, this isn't it, and that's fine.

In return, you get real ownership of a production system with paying customers, equity in the company, a voice in every decision, and the fastest way there is to learn how a software company gets built.

Pay

Salary plus equity. The salary is below what larger companies pay, and the equity is meant to make up the difference. We share the full numbers, salary and equity, in the first conversation, so nobody wastes time.

Experience

There's no required number of years. We care about what you've built. If you're early in your career, show us evidence: something you shipped, people who used it, a hard problem you solved.

How to apply

Apply via this post, and then send three answers to the questions below to alan@superpower.social:

1. A link to something you built and shipped (a product, repo, demo or write-up), and which part was yours.
2. A paragraph or two answering this: Our AI writes replies to public comments on brands' paid ads. What's the first thing you'd worry about going wrong, and how would you catch it before a client does?
3. A paragraph or two answering this: Tell us about something you started or took over with nobody asking you to, like a product, a side business, a club, or a broken process at work. What did you do, how did it turn out, and what would you do differently?

Please refrain from writing this entirely with AI, we read every single one of these, and we'll know right away. We would rather you send something shorter that you wrote yourself, vs. longer and AI written.

We won't review applications that are missing an email.