Founding Engineer

Hi I’m Stephen, Co-Founder and CTO  are on a mission to revolutionize online communities with an innovative platform built for trust, engagement, and connection, especially meeting members where they are within an app they already love:
Slack. Tightknit powers customer and developer communities for teams like Clay, Mother Duck, Mixpanel, Vanta, Gamma, and Stripe.

Our vision is to make communities a bastion of genuine human relationship and the OS for every business’s sales & marketing team. And we are hiring our first Founding Engineer to help us build that future!

As an early engineer, you will:

• Work directly with the CTO
• Define architecture, not just implement it
• Shape product direction, not just execute it
• Own systems end-to-end (design → implementation → monitoring → iteration)
• Interact directly with customers
• Build internal AI workflows to accelerate our velocity
• Help determine how engineering operates here
• Wear many hats and operate independently with high accountability

This isn’t just a coding role. It is a seat at the table. In fact, while programming knowledge matters, in the AI age it’s becoming less and less central to our day-to-day work. So who are we really looking for?

• Engineer with taste - Put away the IDE for a moment and put on your PM hat. We trust in your ability to talk to customers, synthesize their asks, and create excellent products with extreme level of thoughtfulness and detail. You hold yourself and your work to a high bar.
• Engineer who can design - You don’t need to be a front-end wizard (although we’d love if you are!), but you have a good eye for distinguishing good vs. bad UX. Don’t expect sloppiness in any area of the stack to be fixed by someone else.
• Engineer who can manage - Everyone now has access to an army of digital employees and the best programmers on earth. Can you effectively use them to multiply yourself and our team? Oh and did we mention, everyone at Tightknit is a community manager!

This is a staff-level role, so we require at least 5+ years of experience as a full-time full-stack engineer. You must possess strong backend engineering fundamentals and experience designing production systems.

Experience at an early-stage startup or working directly with founders is strongly preferred. Experience delivering enterprise products is a bonus.

We believe every hire either makes us “smarter” (fills in our weak spots) or “stronger” (adds fuel to our strengths), or both! For this role, we will be honing in especially on candidates whose skills make us smarter.

You do not need to know all of these perfectly on day one, but you must be able to learn quickly.

• Languages & Frameworks: Java script / Typescript, React, Next.js, Tan Stack, Node.js, Tailwind
• Infrastructure & Cloud: Cloudflare ecosystem (Workers, KV, Durable Objects, Workflows, Queues), Vercel
• Data: PostgresSQL, Drizzle, Supabase
• Platforms: Slack platform, OpenAPI APIs, and event-driven architectures
• Tools: Github, Linear, Slack, OpenAI, Claude, Cursor, Antigravity, Notion, Posthog, Mintlify, Canva, Sentry (suggest something to us!)

Super Day (typically 1 day) - paid work trial, designed as a mutual compatibility check so you can see what…