Founding Software Engineer — Product

Roark is seeking a Founding Software Engineer focused on product engineering. The role owns customer-facing product surfaces end-to-end, from designing interfaces and APIs to modeling data and shipping production features. The engineer will collaborate with design and customers, improve product quality, and build with TypeScript, React, GraphQL, and Postgres.

Responsibilities:

• Design and build product surfaces end-to-end: Next.js/React frontend, GraphQL API, Postgres data model — schema to pixel
• Turn messy real-world workflows (test suites, issue triage, run reviews) into interfaces that feel obvious in hindsight
• Work directly with design on a system that takes craft seriously — and push back when something reads wrong
• Sit in on customer calls, watch people use your features, and ship the fix the same week
• Raise the bar on quality: tests where they earn their keep, instrumentation everywhere, no silent failures

Requirements:

• 4+ years building production web applications, with deep TypeScript and React experience
• Comfort owning a feature across the whole stack — API design, data modelling, and UI polish
• A portfolio (or war stories) showing product taste: you notice spacing, latency and empty states
• Bias to ship: you would rather put a small version in front of a user this week than a big one next month
• Clear written communication — we are remote and we write things down
• Experience with GraphQL (Pothos/Yoga), Drizzle, or event-driven backends
• You have built developer-facing tools, dashboards or observability products before