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.
• Development Interface Execution: Use Claude Code, Codex, and related tools as a primary development interface, not an occasional assistant.
• 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.
• Agent Expert: You use coding agents every day and thoroughly understand their strengths, limitations, and failure modes from hands-on experience.
• Interface Power-User: You frequently hit usage limits on Claude, Codex, Cursor, or similar tools because you actively push them to execute real-world production code.
• Concrete Portfolio: You have taken ultimate ownership and responsibility for an existing product or system before and possess a portfolio, GitHub repo, Loom, write-up, or concrete example of an application you built from scratch.
• Language Proficiency: You have strong proficiency with Python, PostgreSQL, and associated ORM frameworks (specifically Django and FastAPI).
• Ambiguity Decomposer: You know how to cleanly decompose ambiguous work into technical specs, discrete tasks, automated tests, evals, and reviewable artifacts.
• Innovative Thinker: You are a creative thinker with the ability to identify innovative growth opportunities and experiment with new approaches.
• Agent Failure Detection: You can tell when a gene

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 agent-powered workflows, and creating the structural harnesses that let engineers and operators ship software quickly and safely with AI. 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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