Founding Engineer

Responsibilities

• AI Function Leadership: Build and lead an AI-native engineering function with clear standards, fast shipping, and strong production discipline.
• Core Infrastructure Improvement: Improve our core distributed systems, backend architectures, data ingestion layers, search, quoting, data management, payments, reporting, and internal copilots.
• Agentic Harness Design: Design the harnesses that make agentic engineering reliable: repo instructions, skills, MCP tools, scripts, hooks, CI gates, evals, observability, permissions, and review loops.
• Custom Sub-Agent Infrastructure: Architect and deploy autonomous, custom multi-agent pipelines and harnesses (repo instructions, custom MCP tools, CI gates, and advanced LLM evaluation matrices) to automate the engineering loop from spec to deployment safely.
• Development Interface Execution: Use Claude Code, Codex, and related tools as a primary development interface, not an occasional assistant.
• Near-100% AI Velocity: Operate at the absolute frontier of developer velocity, writing near 100% of initial code utilizing autonomous agents and advanced IDE tools , treating your role as the system architect who guides and validates the agents rather than writing line-by-line boilerplate.
• Non-Engineer Contribution Paths: Create a safe contribution path for non-engineers using AI tools, with rigorous engineering review loops at the right friction points.
• Operational Systems Transformation: Turn messy, ambiguous operational constraints into simple, durable systems.
• Team Development: Recruit, coach, and raise the engineering bar for a lean, elite engineering team.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with growth, sales, operations, and finance to ship software that improves company revenue, margin, speed, and customer experience.

Requirements

• Hacker Mindset: You are a hacker in all aspects of life.
• Full-Stack Depth: You are a strong full-stack engineer with a heavy backend bias.
• Production Ownership: You have owned complex production systems that real customers or business operators depend on daily.
• Startup DNA: You have experience with early-stage, high-growth tech environments, operating within lean and efficient teams.
• Leadership Capabilities: You have strong leadership skills with experience in building, mentoring, and managing high-performing engineering teams or technical pods.
• The AI Frontier Builder: You do not just use AI tools as basic autocomplete assistants or for standard boilerplate . You are actively engineering custom sub-agents and localized testing guardrails to push development to near-100% autonomous code execution .
• Autonomous Velocity Master: You frequently hit hard rate limits on frontier tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) because they serve as your primary pipeline execution interface . You manage code qualit

Benefits

Additional Information

About Frontier Frontier is a subsidiary of Fresh Prints . Fresh Prints is a New York-based, fast-growing, fully remote, 150-person company with most of our team based in India and the Philippines. A few years ago, Fresh Prints began helping other fast-growing companies build their teams. We got so good at it that we spun out a new company to focus exclusively on that - and called it Frontier . At Frontier, we help companies grow full-time, cross-functional teams abroad. We hire the smartest people and place them into the best companies. In three years, we've never lost a client. If you're interested in a Frontier role and you apply and are accepted, we'll screen you through a couple of internal interviews and aim to get you an interview for a full-time job within the month. Think of us as your personal talent agent - and good luck with the application! 😊 The Role: Founding Engineer Your mandate is to build the core systems, advanced backend products, and engineering culture that let Frontier scale our leading enterprise automation and workflows. This means owning complex production systems, optimizing internal operational tooling, building multi-agent architectures , and creating the custom sub-agent infrastructures, pipelines, and harnesses that achieve near-100% initial code generation velocity safely. You will work directly with our leadership team and senior operators on the company's highest-leverage engineering problems: end-to-end data processing speed, high-concurrency search quality, operator productivity, platform onboarding, client intelligence, and AI-assisted operations. We are only interested in someone who takes a long-term ownership mentality to technical architecture, infrastructure stability, and core business partnerships. Existing Tech Stack Backend: Python (Django and FastAPI frameworks) Database: PostgreSQL Database and associated ORM frameworks Infrastructure: AWS Services and/or Railway cloud architectures AI/Agentic Interface: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Model Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools, custom scripts, evaluation frameworks, and real-time observability pipelines

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