Porters - Founding Engineer (Tech Lead)
Requirements
• Experience: Typically 8+ years of professional software engineering, with a track record of shipping in fast-paced, ambiguous environments. Regulated industry and/or VC-backed startup experiences are a plus. • IC strength: A hands-on builder who ships the hard things, and who naturally thinks in business outcomes, work packages, ROI, and extensibility. • IC strength: • Project definition: Proven ability to write requirements and designs from business context, break them into estimated, sequenced work, and drive a project to completion in a tool like Linear. • Project definition: • Technical proficiency: Deep proficiency in Python is mandatory, with strong command of REST API design, relational data modeling, and layered, service-oriented architecture. • Technical proficiency: • AI-native: Real experience building LLM/agentic tooling, and understanding how to bound probabilistic output with deterministic code. • AI-native: • Natural leader: You lift the people around you through design review, coaching, and clear direction, and you enjoy doing it. • Natural leader: • Going the extra mile: Be part of a high-growth phase, where we move fast and expect focused intensity. 9-to-5 is not the mode we work in, if you want to build something that matters with a team that ships, we are your people. • Going the extra mile:
Responsibilities
• Deliver the highest-risk work yourself: Be the IC where it matters. Personally engineer the most complex, business-critical components, from cross-service logic to the boundary where AI outputs become deterministic, auditable actions, and set the technical bar for the team as you go. • Deliver the highest-risk work yourself: • Turn business goals into shipped projects: Take an ambiguous problem and own it through to delivery, defining requirements, a design that starts from customer impact and takes the highest-ROI path whether it's make or buy, sequenced work, estimates, and clear engineering acceptance criteria a team can execute with minimal churn. • Turn business goals into shipped projects: • Design complex systems that don’t break down in 12 months: Architect entire systems so the likely next requirement plugs in cleanly through configuration or a new adapter, keeping components reusable and loosely coupled, separating business logic from shared services, and maintaining a single authoritative, append-only source of truth for critical data - including consideration of make-or-buy options. • Design complex systems that don’t break down in 12 months: • Scale the team's autonomy and quality: Set decision thresholds so engineers self-serve low-stakes calls, define sanctioned paths for experimenting with regulated data, and spread understanding of our systems to cut key-person risk. Settle design in review, then build the road to production: CI/CD with quality gates, automated migrations, and systems that report their own health. • Scale the team's autonomy and quality: • Wow our customers: You solve for the customer's actual problem, not just the request, and measure success by customer outcomes. What would it take for the customer to say “Porters made my day!”? • Wow our customers:
Benefits
• Ownership of whole product areas: Latitude to shape what we build and how we scope, sequence, and ship it, with a team to build it with. • Ownership of whole product areas: • Founder collaboration: Work directly with founders who have built and scaled fintech and analytics products before. • Founder collaboration: • We win and lose together as a team: We expect people to leave their comfort zone on a daily basis, however, we work together as a team and support each other at any time. • We win and lose together as a team: • Growth: A dedicated development budget, free to use for whatever gives you a level-up. • Growth: • Culture: Strong focus on a healthy, high-performance team culture, ranging from regular team events and dinners to an inclusive, fast-paced team that grows together. • Culture: • Our stack • Our stack • Core Backend: Python 3.14, FastAPI, Pydantic, and SQLAlchemy 2.0 in a strict four-layer architecture, exposed as separate internal and external APIs. • Core Backend: • Background processing: Containerized worker services and event-driven AWS Lambda orchestrators for email ingestion, document triaging, and action running. • Background processing: • AI Integration: AI orchestration deeply integrated into application landscape via AWS Bedrock, e.g., to extract information and drive agentic activity. • AI Integration: • Data & Storage: Per-tenant Aurora MySQL in isolated subnets, S3 for document persistence, and an append-only ledger for auditability. • Data & Storage: • Platform: A multi-tenant AWS environment on ECS Fargate with strict per-tenant network and data isolation (VPC, NACLs, WAF), CloudFront + Cognito (Google SSO/JWT) and API Gateway (IAM) at the edge, defined as code in CloudFormation across dev/staging/prod accounts. • Platform: • Frontend: React single-page app for the internal workbench. • Frontend: • Dev Workflow: uv, Ruff, ty, pytest (unit, integration, property-based), Docker, GitHub Actions, and heavy use of Agentic IDEs to accelerate feature shipping. • Dev Workflow:
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