Founding Engineer

Founding Engineer — Architecture & Scale

Location: US Remote (Austin based preferred)
Reports to: Founder/CEO
Compensation: $120K-$175K plus up to 3% equity

Why this role exists

Radius is building infrastructure for a part of the housing market the travel stack largely ignores: midterm stays for traveling professionals, relocations, and insurance-displacement housing.

We already have:

• a working product
• paying customers
• active marketplace supply
• an ongoing pilot with a major insurance housing company

The founding team brings deep experience across PropTech, consulting, private equity, and corporate housing operations — including multiple years directly operating a corporate housing business. We understand the operational pain points behind the workflows we’re building for.

We’re now at the stage where architecture decisions materially matter. The next phase is less about “building an MVP” and more about building systems that scale reliably across inventory, bookings, integrations, and payments.

You’ll work directly with the founders in a small, highly collaborative team. Founders here ship code, stay close to customers, and make decisions quickly. The founding team are brothers, which we think creates unusually strong alignment, trust, and long-term thinking around how the company is built.

This is an individual contributor role focused on building, architecture, and execution — not people management. Over time, there’s room for the role to evolve into broader technical leadership as the team scales.

How we work

We care more about sustained execution than heroics.

We’re pragmatic, product-oriented, and highly collaborative. We value engineers who can think deeply about systems while still moving quickly and staying close to users.

We optimize for:

• clear ownership
• low ego
• fast iteration
• practical decision-making
• systems that stay understandable as they grow

We’re flexible about how people organize their work and time. We care much more about outcomes, reliability, and momentum than performative hustle.

What you’ll work on

Our current stack:

• Django 5.1 + DRF
• Postgres 16
• React 19 / Vite / Tailwind
• Stripe Connect

The product works today. The next challenge is building the infrastructure that makes the next 10x phase feel operationally boring and reliable.

You’ll take ownership of problems like:

Search & discovery

Today: Leaflet / Mapbox + Supercluster
Next: scalable geo-query infrastructure using tools like PostGIS and OpenSearch, with fast map interactions across large inventory sets.

Async infrastructure

Moving long-running workflows and webhook processing into a reliable async architecture with strong operational discipline around retries, observability, and failure handling.

Calendar consistency

Designing reliable availability reconciliation across OTA drift, direct bookings, and external integrations — including locking strategies, idempotency, and consistency guarantees.

Payments & payouts

Building resilient Stripe Connect workflows for installment payments, payouts, reconciliation, and replayable webhook processing.

Automated testing & trustability

As LLM-assisted development speeds up iteration, maintaining trust in the system matters more — not less. We care about strong automated testing, regression detection, safe deploys, and reducing the blast radius of changes.

Infrastructure & deployment

Improving CI/CD, observability, logging, and deployment workflows using declarative infrastructure and GitOps-style practices (Terraform, Pulumi, AWS CDK, or similar).

Multi-tenant performance (future-facing)

As insurance and enterprise workloads grow, we expect new scaling and permissioning challenges around bursty traffic patterns and account isolation. This is likely a later-stage optimization problem, but we want someone who naturally thinks ahead about those tradeoffs.

The technologies above are directional, not predetermined. We care more about sound engineering judgment than attachment to specific tools.

You’ll also participate in product discussions and customer conversations. We want engineering tightly connected to the operational realities of the platform.

What success looks like

In your first week

• Push code to production
• Understand the booking and payments flows
• Improve or simplify at least one small piece of the system
• Build context around the operational realities of the business

In your first 1–3 months

• Take ownership of one major infrastructure area
• Improve reliability, observability, or deployment confidence
• Reduce operational friction for the team
• Help establish stronger engineering standards around testing and system trustability

In your first year

• Help build the technical foundation for the next order of magnitude of scale
• Create systems that are easier to operate, extend, and reason about
• Influence hiring and engineering culture as the team grows
• Help shape the long-term architecture of the platform

What we’re looking for

Strong backend and systems experience

You’ve spent 6+ years building and operating production systems, ideally in marketplaces, booking platforms, fintech, logistics, or similarly operationally complex products.

Depth in Django + Postgres

You understand the practical scaling side of backend systems: indexing, query optimization, connection management, data modeling, migrations, and operational tradeoffs.

Experience with event-driven systems

You’ve worked with async workflows, queues, webhook ingestion, idempotent consumers, and distributed-system edge cases — and you know when simplicity is the better choice.

Product-minded engineering

You care about the user and the business outcome, not just technical elegance. You’re comfortable shipping across backend and frontend boundaries when needed.

Pragmatism

You have a bias for the simplest thing that survives 10x. You delete code as enthusiastically as you write it.

Comfortable with modern AI tooling

You use LLMs and automation pragmatically in engineering workflows or product experiences, and you’re thoughtful about where they genuinely add value.

Nice to have

• PostGIS or geospatial systems experience
• Stripe Connect platform experience
• OTA or channel-manager integrations (Hospitable, Guesty, etc.)
• Declarative infrastructure / GitOps experience
• AWS or GCP at production scale
• Marketplace or booking-platform scaling experience

Where the company is going

We believe insurance-displacement housing is operationally fragmented, underserved, and still heavily workflow-driven. Most existing systems were not designed for reliability, modern integrations, or scalable inventory coordination.

Over the next 12–24 months, we expect to:

• expand marketplace supply significantly
• deepen insurance and enterprise workflows
• continue scaling booking volume
• grow the engineering team deliberately
• raise additional capital as the platform matures

We think there’s an opportunity to build the infrastructure layer that powers this category over the next decade — not just another rental marketplace.

Compensation

We know this role carries meaningful ownership and technical scope.

The compensation range reflects the realities of an early-stage, capital-efficient company, while equity is intended to provide real long-term upside for someone excited to help build the platform from an early stage.

How to apply

Email [email protected] with:

• a short note about your background
• a system you’ve helped scale and what you learned from it
• which area you’d prioritize first at Radius (Search, Async, Calendar, or Payments), and why

We read every application carefully.

We’re looking for someone who enjoys making complicated systems feel boringly reliable.