Founding Engineer

About the Role

Upside is a referral partnership platform for professional services. We’re enabling the future of work where most knowledge workers do some form of consulting or advising – either full‑time or on the side. 82% of knowledge workers want to diversify their work outside of a single employer, but only 1 in 3 who want in are doing it. Most people do not want to market their own services publicly or become Linked In thought leaders.

Upside solves this by enabling people to privately get clients from their network and earn money by making referrals to others.

Our founding team are repeat founders and alums of Y Combinator, Amazon, and Venture for America. We’ve built freelance marketplaces, tools, and professional networks before, and our past companies have been backed by investors like Khosla Ventures, SV Angel, and Bloomberg Beta. Upside builds on everything we’ve learned over the course of our careers so far. With Upside we’re taking a different approach from traditional freelance and professional networks.

We’re building the bottoms‑up SaaS that helps people power their own referral networks. We’re in paid private beta with a user base that’s growing significantly month over month, with multiple case studies of users making 6‑figures in net new income via Upside.

We’re now looking for our founding engineer to help us build the product that can support and continue to drive our early growth. Ideal candidates have a founder mentality and strong ownership. You’re often the first to roll up your sleeves and get into the trenches to solve a problem, and have a strong bias for throughput. While you love engineering, you’re driven first and foremost by serving and shipping valuable stuff for customers.

Maybe you’ve built and scaled products from scratch before, or maybe you’re itching to take on that challenge for the first time.

We’re firmly committed to in‑person work (3 days per week in our Lower Manhattan office). We believe IRL collaboration is essential in the early stages of company‑building.

Our founding team has all worked together before, and we have a great operating rhythm for someone new to plug into. Our customers are impressive people who are a joy to work with and learn from. You’ll have a lot of flexibility in your role and will be able to help define what it looks like and where you want to go over time.

You’ll be the fourth person on our team and will get deep exposure to every part of the business. You will help create our company’s culture. You should be comfortable with ambiguity. This is not the kind of job where you show up and we tell you exactly what to do every day.

• Strong full‑stack web development experience
• Relish the opportunity to be the sole engineer and work with our product lead to build tech from scratch, quickly
• Good product instincts and interest in contributing to the growth of Upside beyond just engineering
• Familiarity with the problem we’re solving, including doing some form of consulting/freelancing/contracting in the past
• 4–10+ years professional experience
• Based in NYC (or willing to relocate)

• Be positive sum, not extractive
• Align incentives, don’t rely on good intentions
• Humbly serve our customers and learn from them
• Be high‑throughput and build leverage as we go
• Enable upward mobility for ourselves and others
• People invest things other than money so treat everyone like an investor

$150,000 – $200,000 + equity