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/staff-level individual contributor generalist and owning a product or platform end-to-end solo or near-solo; formal project-leadership titles are not required.
Nice to Have
- 1–2+ years of LLM application engineering experience covering prompt design, evaluation, grounding and orchestration/agent safety, or evidence of fast, rigorous learning in a new technical domain.
- 2+ years of security fundamentals covering multi-tenant access control, secrets management and authentication/OAuth, or a security-conscious engineering track record without a formal security title.
- Experience translating ISO 27001/SOC 2 requirements into engineering practice. No prior certification experience is required, but you must be able to research and implement compliance requirements independently ahead of the April 2027 target.
- 2+ years of startup/founding engineer or small-team, high-ownership experience, or a track record of shipping solo or near-solo end-to-end without a supporting team.
- 1+ year of rapid-prototype/AI-generated codebase remediation experience, such as with Lovable, v0 or Bolt-originated codebases, or experience stabilising and hardening fast-built code of any origin.
- 1+ year of Stripe billing/payments API integration experience, or experience with another payments or metering API integration.
