Founding Engineer

Substrate builds financial infrastructure to grow America’s industrial GDP.

We're hiring a founding engineer to build core 0→1 systems at the intersection of software, hardware, and finance. You'll help architect and ship systems that power machine shops, farms, factories, construction contractors, and more.

We hire for two archetypes: a Systems Engineer who has tackled rare, hard technical problems and thinks in algorithms and infrastructure — or a Product Engineer who combines sharp business instincts with design sensibility and loves the full arc from customer pain to shipped product.

This is a true founding role: you’ll own full-stack product cycles end-to-end, from customer discovery to production deployment. You’ll occasionally travel with the founder to factory floors, meet Main Street manufacturers and Wall Street lenders face-to-face, and build exactly what the field demands.

• You believe in objective good and beauty, and you want to bring them to an antiquated, predatory industry.

• You believe not all technology is created equal. You don’t care about building another enterprise SaaS tool, you want to build tools that advance civilization.

• You want to work with people who treat their work as craft, who violently reject “just good enough,” and you want to help build that culture.

• Wrap beautiful and simple abstractions around gnarly complexity and legacy systems

• Own full product lifecycle—from customer pain → UI/UX design → 0-to-1 full-stack engineering → ship product

• Design and deploy production-grade LLM systems that automate core loan operations (e.g., underwriting, compliance, document processing)

• Help build a product culture that harmonizes speed, taste, and customer obsession

Track A — Systems Track

• 0–4 years full-time experience shipping production-grade systems using Node.js, React, AWS, Postgres, TypeScript

• You've solved hard technical problems most of your peers haven't encountered — and you can explain exactly why your solution was non-obvious

• You gravitate toward distributed systems, data pipelines, backend infrastructure, and architectural tradeoffs

• You have strong opinions about what good abstractions look like

• Node.js/TypeScript, Postgres, and AWS are comfortable territory, but you pick tools deliberately

• You love LLMs and are the kind of person to max out on tokens

• You resonate with our engineering philosophy

Track B — Product Track

• You think holistically about product, growth, and business — the kind of person who listens to Invest Like the Best or reads Stratechery for fun

• Spinning up fast mockups and demos in Figma, Lovable, or similar feels like second nature

• growth.design is something you'd enjoy reading

• You love LLMs and are the kind of person to max out on tokens

• You resonate with our engineering philosophy

• $125-$175K base + 0.1-0.5% equity

• Free rent in SF

• Best-in-class medical, dental, vision

• Unlimited vacation

If you are interested, please apply via Dover AND email [email protected] with:

• A brief description of the most technically challenging software you've ever built. Go into specific details about the tech stack you chose, why you chose them other alternatives, key technical challenges and how you solved them, and any architectural tradeoffs you had to make. Use bullet points.

• Availability for a 30min call