Founding Engineer – Full-Stack (Remote, Full-Time) [AS324] (PK)

About Smart Working

At Smart Working , we believe your job should not only look right on paper but also feel right every day. This isn’t just another remote opportunity - it’s about finding where you truly belong, no matter where you are. From day one, you’re welcomed into a genuine community that values your growth and well-being.

Our mission is simple: to break down geographic barriers and connect skilled professionals with outstanding global teams and products for full-time, long-term roles. We help you discover meaningful work with teams that invest in your success, where you’re empowered to grow personally and professionally.

Join one of the highest-rated workplaces on Glassdoor and experience what it means to thrive in a truly remote-first world.

About the Role

As a Founding Engineer, you’ll be the first in-house engineering hire, owning the platform across frontend, backend and infrastructure. You’ll scale and evolve the existing AI-native Professional Services Automation platform while continuing to deliver customer-facing features.

This is a senior/staff-level IC role with significant ownership and autonomy, with scope to grow as the company scales.

Responsibilities

- Own the product end-to-end as a solo generalist, building, shipping and deploying across frontend, backend and infrastructure without a supporting team.

- Keep the live platform healthy, including handling incidents and defects and managing safe releases and rollback.

- Use AI/agentic coding tools to increase personal output while independently verifying correctness, security and robustness rather than trusting AI-generated output blindly.

- Lead the platform towards ISO 27001 and SOC 2 readiness by April 2027, translating external compliance requirements into concrete engineering controls; prior certification experience is not required.

- Make the AI assistant and orchestration features reliable, measurable and safe.

- Decide what to preserve, isolate, improve or replace in the current platform based on customer risk and commercial value, without undertaking an unnecessary rebuild.

- Move fluidly across frontend and backend as a true full-stack generalist, with no fixed frontend/backend split.

- Harden, scale and evolve the existing product, including delivery intelligence, AI assistant, SOW ingestion, project/resource/commercial management and a beta orchestration layer, while continuing to ship customer-facing improvements.

- Work solo end-to-end as the company's hands-on technical owner, with the potential to help decide on and shape the first supporting engineering hire once funding closes.

- Work effectively with high ambiguity, evolving scope and close, direct collaboration with both technical and non-technical founders.

Requirements

- 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, ideally including early-stage startup or high-ownership experience.

- 5+ years of senior-level full-stack engineering experience across a React/TypeScript frontend and Node/Postgres-style backend, or a strong modern JavaScript/TypeScript full-stack equivalent such as Next.js or Vue/Nuxt, with proven end-to-end ownership.

- 4+ years of senior-level experience with solo ownership of cloud deployment, releases and CI/CD, or a proven record of shipping and operating production infrastructure without a dedicated DevOps/platform team.

- 3+ years of senior-level experience with Postgres/Supabase or equivalent, including row-level security and edge functions. Deep relational database experience with another Postgres-based backend, Firebase or PlanetScale is also acceptable.

- 1–2+ years of senior-level experience using AI-assisted/agentic coding tools such as Cursor, Claude Code or Copilot to ship production software, or demonstrable heavy and disciplined use of LLMs within a professional development workflow.

- Have a clear method for checking AI-generated output rather than trusting it blindly.

- Be comfortable operating as a senior/sta