Founding Engineer

Porter is the AI finance team for startups and small businesses. Our platform runs a company’s entire finance function: the books, the AI agents that do the work inside them, and the controls that keep it accountable. We’re VC-backed and pre-seed with a two-person founding team (CEO and CTO) and a growing roster of AI agents handling bookkeeping, AR, AP, payroll, tax, and reporting.

We already have customers running their finances on Porter every day and asking for more than two people can build.

That’s why we’re hiring our first dedicated engineer, and why there is an enormous amount to build, fast.

You’ll own the product loop end to end, not just the code. You’ll help decide what we build and why, design how it works, direct AI coding agents to build it, test and ship it, then watch how customers actually use it and feed that back into what comes next. You work directly with the CEO and CTO and have real influence over the company’s product and technical direction from day one.

This is engineering in an AI-native environment, but the job is bigger than engineering. The constraint is no longer typing speed; it’s judgment: what to build, how to architect it, whether the agents’ output is right, and what the customer signal is telling you to do next.

• Understand the business deeply: what we’re building, why, and what’s next. Bring your own ideas for product and experiments.
• Own features end to end: scope → design → direct the coding agents → test → deploy → measure.
• Watch how customers use what you ship, and turn that signal into the next enhancement or experiment.
• Own system architecture across Porter’s stack (FastAPI + Postgres backend, React + Type Script frontend, AI agent tooling), and drive the AI agents to build to that design.
• Build internal tooling (agent harnesses, tests, and infrastructure) that multiplies how much one person can ship.
• Hold a high bar for correctness on software that handles customers’ money.
• Help shape the company’s trajectory: product, technical, and strategic.

• Senior engineering experience. Years shipping production software across real systems. You’ve seen enough architectures, languages, and failure modes to make sound design decisions with confidence.
• Strong system design. You think in terms of data models, boundaries, and how a system behaves under scale. You can distinguish a clean design from one that merely works.
• Fluency writing code. You can read what an AI agent produces and immediately judge whether it’s correct, performant, and secure, because you could write it yourself.
• Deep experience with AI coding tools. You already build by directing agents and reviewing their output. Getting high-quality results from a model is a skill, and you have it.
• Product and customer instinct. You don’t wait for specs. You watch what customers do, form a view on what to build next, and make the call. You care about the user, not just the system.
• Founder-level ownership. You take something ambiguous and run the entire loop (idea to shipped to measured) with minimal oversight, and you want a real say in where the company goes.

The timing is rare. We closed funding in our first week out. We have real customers — not a waitlist, paying users running their books on Porter today — pulling us toward more product than two people can ship. And the surface area is huge: every part of a company’s finance function, rebuilt to run on AI agents.

You’d be the first engineer in the room for all of it. You’ll define how an AI-native company gets built from the ground up, ship to real customers in days instead of quarters, and watch your work get used the moment it lands. This is the front‑row seat to building the thing, and the chance to set what serious engineering looks like when agents do the implementation.

Competitive salary and meaningful equity. We’re early, and the equity is significant.